Viral
by DizzyTech
Summary: After escaping the trap of a new enemy, something happened to Ben. Something weird. Something strange. Something, maybe, just maybe, dangerous. RETURNING SOON 3/2010!
1. Trade

**Viral Chapter 1: Trade**

* * *

_"Station, do you copy?" "Yeah, James. Kyle here." "Any news on bike gangs?" "What?" "Motorcycles." "No, not since the noise ordinance and that business with the bugs. Why?" "Some 'ruffians' _(chuckles)_ reported down on the Bellwood end of things, going out into the desert." "Huh. Strange. Any units in that area?" "Not at this time'a night." "Can you head down there?" "Yeah, why not. Got nothin' better to do. Over and out." -- _Radio Conversation, Elderby County Police

* * *

Heavy metal blared loudly out of the high-quality speakers. Bass thumped, electric guitars screamed, and frontmen poured their hearts out to the world. As the ninth grader grimaced at the heavy stream of cuss words, he wondered if he and the driver of the car – who was, at this moment, about three inches from the boy's nose – could be any more different. Hell, he was even weirded out by the fact that they were the same species.

The driver poked into the boy's thoughts. "You not likin' the tunes, hero boy?"

It was creepy how he did that. The fifteen-year-old looked up from the window to the general direction of the front seat. "Why?"

The driver shot his signature smirk into the rearview mirror, which the boy easily spotted. "Dude, you look like you just crapped your pants and then had to wear it around town. Little bit obvious, man."

The gross, but accurate, metaphor made the boy knit his eyebrows. His grimace simplified into a sheepish frown. "Well.. n... yeah."

His smirk turned back to his (also trademarked) pugnacious scowl. "Huh. Well, get used to it. Loser."

The boy's gaze returned downward. He hated riding in this guy's car. Mostly because of the guy driving it. You see, it's incredibly awkward to be around somebody who you want to turn in to the police. Especially when that very person wants very much to drain every ounce of power from your body. So, you see, awkward relationship, right?

It was at that moment he heard his cousin's voice in his head. "Just try and get along with him, please? He's changed; he's not the same eleven-year-old psychopath."

The boy thought a retort to the imaginary family member. "No, he can just drive now."

Now, he glanced momentarily outside his window once again. As it turns out, the conversation wasn't imaginary. The relative in question floated outside his window at pace with the speeding vehicle. A purplish aura surrounded her, which convinced the boy that she actually hadn't left her post in front of the car. He got hit with an icy glare as the cousin spoke in his mind once again. "Just try and not be an ass for once."

"Whatever," he responded.

The driver turned around in his seat with a grin and a stare. His voiced softened in a fake way and his expression turned to a pout. "Oh, come on, Ben. We might become friends."

Oh, well, that tore it. He knew how the driver seemed to be reading his thoughts. The teenager pointed his finger in a "one-sec" way and said, "Excuse me, please." He pressed a button recessed into the passenger door, unlatched his seatbelt, and stood up through a sunroof. His shoulders rose just above the metallic covering, so he stretched his arms out and stuck out his elbows like a chicken to hold himself up.

The boy cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, "Gwen, would you **please** not relay my thoughts to your boyfriend anymore? Kinda' creepy, I keep some stuff up there that's private business. Thank you."

He expected what was coming and ducked slightly as a purplish-pink lightning bolt sizzled just above where his nose just was. His hair singed slightly. Ben pulled himself back up, and yelled. "Aw, come on, it's a joke! If you can laugh at my thoughts when you want to, why can't I make a joke once in a while?"

Her voice snuck into his mind again, while the real girl spun around slightly and shot the glare again. "Shut up or I'm going to make sure there won't anything left for me to relay!"

He laughed, and flipped his cousin the bird. "How threatening! Do you take classes?" Ben ducked back inside and closed the sunroof.

The driver once again turned around. "For the record, that whole absorbing your powers stuff stopped once I figured out it couldn't be done without two copies of myself."

Ben glared confusedly. "... but me?"

"I'd would've taken my chances," was the response.

Ben Tennyson crossed his arms, bit his tongue, and sat back in the sticky leather seat.

Kevin smirked again and ran his fingers over the dashboard, wishfully touching the button that would knock his backseat passenger fifty feet in the air over the car. One day, if he had any sort of luck.

* * *

It was shortly over three hours later. Time was deepening into the late night. The air was dry to the point where breathing felt hot. The ground had radiated almost every drop of sunlight it had soaked up during the fiery day, and the temperatures consequently descended.

Now was the time for waiting, and that was that. The car sat cooling after a long day of baking under the sun. The trio was entirely alone. The desert expanded clearly for miles and miles except for a rock here and there.

The entire slab of tar was illuminated by a single light. Everything glowed orange and clear.

Ben Tennyson sat cross-legged on the pavement, chewing on the end of a ballpoint pen. He had unzipped his jacket a long time before, and was furiously scribbling into a notebook.

Gwen was in the corner of the pavement, creating pink gleaming spheres in the dark. Every couple of minutes, she would snap her fingers and the balls of magic would detonate. A small puff of sand would leap about two yards in the air and settle back down.

Kevin was screwing with his car, as usual. The radio softly played as he lay on his back under the machinery, toying with some unknown component and humming alone to the tune. The relative quiet was broken by his eternally laid-back voice. "One of my suppliers should be here any second with the equipment. There's some camping junk still in the trunk from when we last pulled an all-nighter. Gwen, you're welcome to grab it at any time."

Ben looked up for a second from his work, noticing the intentional lack of his name. "Tennyson," Kevin preemptively replied, "you'll be good on your own."

Ben bit the inside of his cheek. He closed his notebook, retracted the tip of his pen, and shoved it all back into his knapsack. He stood up and walked over to Kevin's car, opening the side door to put his bag in. Very deliberately, he slammed the door as hard as he could. Very promptly, the vehicle's owner scurried out a couple of inches so that the green-jacketed hero would trip as he trudged away from the car.

Throwing a dirty look over his shoulder, Ben went back to his previous spot and lay down on his back to stretch out. He closed his eyes and relaxed for a couple of minutes.

Without any warning whatsoever, all hell broke loose. It started with a light buzz that turned to a roar. Trucks and bikes screamed up the road leading to the dead end. The occupants of those vehicles screamed and whooped. Gwen detonated the last of her magical exercises and didn't wait a second to spin around toward the action.

Kevin rolled out from under his car and jumped to his feet in a single notion. He sniffed the air for a moment. He spoke again, this time yelling. "Damn it! This wasn't the deal!" After stating the obvious, the ex-con sprinted to the aforementioned trunk and yanked it open. He pulled out some sort of foreign (read: not of any terrestrial recognition) weapon and strafed away from his car. Ben shouted, "Who are they?!"

The edges of Kevin's face turned downwards. His muscles twitched ever so slightly, and his voice came out in a half-croak. "I think... that's one of my suppliers."

Gwen's voice was just as uneasy. "... one?" After a nod to the question, she quickly jumped into a battle stance.

The cars and hogs puttered and growled into the parking lot. Motors clicked off, headlights dimmed, doors slammed, and feet stomped. A leader immediately emerged from the pack. Those surrounding him were dressed informally in button-up shirts and shorts. They also toted quite large (but still human-made) weapons.

Kevin sneered; his assumption was correct. "What the hell are they doing here?" Deep inside his weapon, a dark green glow started.

The leader appeared to be human in appearance. His hair was dark and spiky, while his teeth were impeccably brick-like. He wore khakis in contrast to the rest of his thirty-person posse. Even in the darkness of the night, each of the group wore sunglasses. As he smiled, his help up his Caucasian hands defensively. The leader spoke with a faint Australian accent with an overly excited tone.

"Heeeeeeyyyyyyyyy, man! Calm down, now. No need for anger, I just got me some protection with out here."

It looked like Kevin was ready to kill each and every one of them. "Do you have what I asked for?"

The unknown talked scoffed and looked around at his group incredulously. "This guy's a joker! Naw, I decided I'd like to have you tracking me around the country. No, seriously, though, I have it right here."

He walked over to one of the vehicles and pulled something out of the passenger side window. He looked it over for a second, then brought it back over to where our trio stood.

Kevin's look softened a bit. "Ah, the Transmuter." He gratefully took it.

"That's right, my friend. Now, you mentioned some sort of compensation."

"Well, about that..."

The smile was lost in about a millisecond. "About what? You expected me to get this nice and ready for you, and you don't return the favor. Now that's the exact the reason I got this team around me. Why don't I just..."

He didn't get to finish the sentence. "Now, wait a minute, man. That was not was I said." The muscular mutant walked over to his own car and popped the trunk. He opened it and subsequently hid himself. He turned his head backwards at his friends, motioning for them to come over.

Looking at their opposition for a second, they turned and walked quickly over to the car.

Gwen hissed. "What do you need? Just get what you had for them..."

Kevin stared to grin a bit and looked at her. "Yeah, you see, I kind of..."

Ben snorted. "Lied?"

Kevin shrugged.

"Big shocker."

"So what do we do?"

Kevin screwed up his face. "I was just going to make a run for it..."

"... but he had reinforcements."

"Right. So you think they'll look at what we give them?"

Ben spat, oozing sarcasm, "No! They'll just blindly trade Plumber tech for..."

"... your backpack."

"No way! That's my English paper!"

Gwen elbowed her cousin in the ribs. "That's no way to go about this, so..."

"Okay," Kevin groaned. He slammed the trunk, almost crushing Ben's fingers.

He shrugged towards the traders and shouted, "It's gone! Somebody must have taken it." Kevin instantly remembered that he had left his only weapon in the trunk while trying to break Ben's fingers (that'd show him). "Whoops," "Too late for that," and "Screw it" were all thoughts that rapidly ran through his head.

Their leader frowned in a creepily happy way and clucked loudly. "Oh, that's right, is it? You see, I brought these guys hearing the rumor going around that you play dirty."

For the first time ever, Kevin visibly gulped.

"So, I've decided to keep the Transmuter. You aren't going to pull one over on me! And, thinking of all my other comrades in the business, anybody else for that matter."

Kevin screwed up his face. "Just try and take it back from me!"

The leader chuckled and pointed both of his thumbs and forefingers into the air, making two imaginary guns. The creepy guy fired two shots in the air, and then pointed them at the trio. He made the imaginary motion again, and the attack started.

Although the posses' weapons looked human-made, they most certainly were not. Vibrant flashes and beams lit up the desert night, all aimed directly at Ben, Gwen, and Kevin.

All three sprung into action. Kevin had slowly inched himself towards his car during the conversation, and in a single fluid motion threw open the door and jumped inside. Gwen summoned her powers and rose above the fray, using the technique she had practiced mere minutes before. Ben dropped to the ground to avoid laser fire and crawled under the car.

So, not really an offensive set of moves. Gwen was doing what little she could, but her guerrilla magic attacks were almost instantly noticed and she ended up fending off returning fire. Ben decided to take the same route as his cousin, and activated the Omnitrix.

* * *

A/N: Yeah, I'm back, but only slightly. Just to get something out of my head. Anyway, this is kind of a spiritual recreation of Infection (Remember it? Glad you don't) because I hate it so much. Anyway, this is a bit of a preview, but my R&R requirements still apply. BTW, I'm giving up on _Paradox_, so if you want any of its 4 or 5 storylines, they're up for grabs.


	2. Broken

**Viral Chapter 2: Broken**

* * *

_"Aliens?! Pfft. Nothing that interesting would ever happen out here. Bellwood, though... well, anyways, nope, nothing out here in the desert." _-- Woman to Undercover Plumber

* * *

The engine beat almost rhythmically, not unlike the heavy metal played a yard from the boy's face hours before. Ben coughed up dirt and oil as his blackened face screwed up into a sickened look.

Ben had _tried_ to activate the Omnitrix. The problem, you see, was that the teenager had forgotten he was under a car whose underside had been splayed across its owners chest ten minutes before. Kevin had turned on the car so as to possibly do something useful and unintentionally splattered the boy under his car with a faceful of motor oil. Whoops.

He heard the driver side door open (but not shut). A boot slammed down inches from him, and the sound of an unconventional plasma gun echoed across the pavement. His shots apparently made contact; a fresh round of bullets and beams came around the front of the car. Stamping feet surrounded the car, and Ben heard Kevin swing back into the car. Ben wanted to shout - say something - but he was still choking.

Before he knew it, the bottom side of the car sprang to life as the driver rammed down on the gas. A hiss sounded and Ben's view of the outside world was obscured by smoke.

_Aw, crap._ He knew what was going to happen next, and he had no other choice if he didn't want to get shot. The sound of people was getting closer and closer, smoke or not.

Ben looked rapidly around at the belly of the tank-like car. _Might as well try._ The teenager hooked his feet into low-riding tow hooks a third of the way up the car. (_I'm sure it makes this easy to tow away,_ he thought sarcastically). Next, Ben heaved his body off the ground as held for dear life onto whatever handhold he could find.

He was lucky, too. The car exploded into motion and the ground under Ben slipped away. The boy gritted his teeth - also greasy and black - and thought of what to do next. He could hang on for a few minutes, but not any longer than that. His shoulders were already starting to ache slightly. So, Ben decided he'd wait it out.

Meanwhile, Kevin and Gwen continued the fight as best they could. Gwen deflected shots away from the car back at the posse, occasionally throwing down those glowing electrical charges. Kevin had scored some successful shots when he got out of the car for a moment, but not much more than that. The attackers had decided it would be a good idea to charge Kevin and Ben; Kevin decided it was time for a getaway.

While our polymorphic hero clung to the bottom of the car, Kevin started it up. He had a limited set of tools, but thought that now was a great time to try out a smoke bomb. While it worked somewhat, Gwen's view from above showed that the group still charged on like the could see through the cloudy green mist.

Kevin shifted his car into gear and spun wildly, turning around and rocketing off onto the unpaved desert land. The men he hadn't knocked down or shot already had run back to some of the motorcycles and rode after him.

Ben dared to open his eyes for a second, stealing a glance at the Omnitrix he had made at an attempt to use. The face glowed a familiar orange, causing Ben to groan lowly to himself. _That's all I need. _He heard the motor bikes roaring up behind him. He looked upward and could just see out the front of the car, but it was mostly darkness edged by the glow of headlights. Ben felt the car jerk slightly; it had shifted through all its gears and was probably going in the hundreds. It couldn't go much faster from here, but its current speed worried the 15-year-old the most.

The unknown passenger swung wildly around on the bottom as Kevin swerved to avoid shots from his pursuers. Looking in the rear-view mirror, he quickly added up those following him. There were nine motorcycles total - eight cronies and his favorite trader/traitor. Distantly he could spot the double headlights of the other cars, dotted by pinkish bursts of light.

He pushed his foot down on the gas pedal even harder, watching the speedometer crawl past 130 and hover there. What else could he use? Before Kevin could answer that question, he looked back out at the landscape in front of him. Ahead about 100 feet was a steep drop off that could go for hundreds of fatal feet. To the right, maybe 300 feet at most, was a road that snaked through two towering sets of rocks. He'd have to try and make the road.

Kevin lifted his foot and slammed the brakes, throwing the steering wheel to the right and hitting the gas. In the instant he spun, three of the motorcycles puttered past him. They attempted to perform the same maneuver, but skidded left and then backwards towards the drop. Momentum and gravity took turns... they won this one, and the three bikes skittered off the small cliff. Kevin didn't care about them, he just had to get away. Successfully completing his 90 degree turn, he began to speed up again while moving towards the road. The other six were still closely following.

To Ben's dismay, Kevin hit the road hard. His arms were starting to scream for relief when the huge vehicle hit bumped onto the pavement. Ben's right foot fell from its hold, hitting the road and bouncing. The next few seconds were very unfortunate for the ninth grade hero. Kevin was forced to sling around the curve to avoid slamming into another pile of rocks, slowing down ever so slightly into the turn. Ben had no time to recover from the start of the road, and the curve was just enough to sling him off the bottom of the car.

At the high speeds the convoy was going, Ben almost flew while still being a foot off the ground. Arms still above his head, the boy spun around in the air while he jetted off the drop. It was pretty shallow here, but it was still a 20-foot roll at an almost 45 degree angle. He hit the sand hard and tumbled swiftly. Ben Tennyson was unconscious before he could even think it. An audible set of sickening cracks could have been heard.

For a split second, Kevin saw the flying body roll down the cliff. He almost bit his lip off, but that was the least of his worries. His pursuers were quickly gaining. The driver stamped down on the gas pedal.

His phone rang, barely piercing through the motorized storm behind him. Kevin hit a button on the side of the vibrating cell, and the audio cut through his speakers. Shooting around another curve, he spat into a hidden microphone somewhere in the dashboard, "What?!"

"Where are you and Ben?" Gwen's voice was a lot calmer now. Even Kevin didn't have the heart to tell her, so he made a lie of omission. "I'm being chased down by six of 'em. I saw Ben for one sec back around the curve near the cliff. Go look for him while I shake these guys."

A huge explosion sounded over the phone, cutting off Gwen's response. Kevin was almost yelling: "Wait... what the hell was that?"

"Oh, well... one of my energy discharges got into some of their cars..."

Kevin grinned wildly. "... 'Atta girl!" He could almost see the look on Gwen's face in response. "Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll go look for Ben; all the guys here are knocked out or... what do you mean you saw him for a sec?"

The ex-con winced. "He was... going down the cliff."

"What, like running... ?"

Kevin went down the fourth curve, and he knew what was going next. "Gotta go," he hissed, cutting off his phone. They had tried this road on the way to the meeting place. The road they were going down forked off the highway about two miles back. It was supposed to lead to some town, but stopped with a row of Dead End signs and orange cones before a bridge was supposed to start. It led right into a canyon, and if he kept just the right speed...

The car rounded its final curve and the guys behind him only had a millisecond to see their fates. For the second time that evening, Kevin rammed on the brakes. This time he pulled out all the stops, both shifting downward, braking, and pulling his emergency brake simultaneously. His head ripped forward, but the car plunged out of its hundred-mile speed. Momentum pulled them all forward, and the wall of "DANGER!" signs was shattered. His car pulled up onto the pre-built ramp for the bridge as it came to a stop. Kevin could just barely see the headlights of the motorcycles about fifty yards. They flicked on and off, caused by the motorcycles pulling 360's as they fell.

Kevin stopped to breathe for a moment. He turned around, put the car into reverse, and backed down the ramp. As happily as would like to ignore it... he had to go find Ben.

Meanwhile, Ben was broken. Literally. I mean, broken in the "how-very-lucky-you're-not-conscious-to-feel-this" way. His left arm and both legs looked dangerous. The boy's head was bloodied, and he probably had a broken rib or two. No news on his spine, but it probably wasn't good news.

Two hundred yards away, three men were miraculously walking away from the wreckage of their own motorcycles. Gravity thought it had won that fight, but it was apparently wrong. One of them was carrying a weapon that looked like a cross between a bazooka, and pistol, and one of those kiddy toys that shoots little Styrofoam pellets with suckers on the ends. One of the other two was limping and the final one looked like he was holding his arm on with his opposite hand. Well, that's not saying anything about the guy with the weapon. His helmet was still on his head, and his neck looked vaguely like it was broken in the "there's no way in hell you should be alive" way. Creepy, isn't it?

And they were walking, painfully slow and ghostlike, towards Ben.

Minutes later, they hovered over the cold body of Ben Tennyson.

"Aw, the poor dude looks like he got the same treatment as us," said Broken-Arms.

"'Poor dude?'" That was Broken-Neck. "We're supposed to kill his buddy and make sure to take this guy with us."

Said Broken-Leg, "He must be special, right there."

"Not really sure, dude. He can't be patched up like we can."

Broken-Neck waved his weapon around although there was hardly any light. "Speaking of patched up, I suppose we should empty this out so we can get out of here?"

Broken-Leg responded. "But wasn't that for the guy with the dark hair we're chasing?"

The guy with the weapon sneered, although it couldn't be seen. "Hey, listen here, as long as this thing is emptied, we all get a free pass to the infirmary. Sounds good to me."

The questioner noiselessly shrugged. He lunged down unto his knees and flipped the boy over.

Weapon-toting guy leaned over the fifteen-year-old, placing the quadruple barrels at the base of Ben's spine. The man's head jiggled like a disgusting bobble-head toy. He pushed it down into the teenager's back, leaning all of his weight into it. He then squeezed the trigger. A nasty squelch combined with the noice of a very low bang, as if it was a vaccination needle shot from a gun.

"Good luck to him," said the man holding his arms on.

The creepy group limped away. Their human figures - disguises, rather - flickered off as they walked into the desert. What they were, in reality, was too gruesome to describe.

Now back to Ben. His body convulsively shuddered for about twenty seconds. He took a couple of gasping breaths which then pattered down to gravely shallow breaths. He was in bad shape. On Ben's uninjured arm sat the Omnitrix, which had glowed weird colors this entire time.

Its face faded to a blood red, then to a pinkish-purple, to a navy blue, and then black. And not black as in the color black, but off.

Darkness.


	3. Disoriented

**Viral Chapter 3: Disoriented**

* * *

"Oh god. Oh god. Oh god. Oh god. Oh god. Oh god. Oh god."

_Seven times_, Kevin counted while glaring at the dark road.

"Please, Ben. Oh god. Please."

Gwen was in the passenger seat, turned around and patting her cousin on the back. Ben's injured body lay crumpled on the back seat.

_If he hadn't broken his legs,_ Kevin thought morbidly, _we wouldn'tve been able to fit him._ The teenager was as stiff as a board, and that couldn't be good at all. The driver didn't think this was good at all. He fought off the nauseated pull of guilt at the pit of his stomach. Every time Kevin was put into a stressful situation, his mind tossed up bizarre thoughts. Never good for a defense mechanism; he preferred his supernatural defenses.

The girl, now almost in tears, flopped back down into the chair. She rubbed her temples and pinching her lips shut. Gwen choked, "What are we going to do?"

Kevin changed from glaring to frowning sadly. The soft blue light behind the meters of his dashboard lit his face ever so slightly. He tried to glance at Gwen for a second, but couldn't bear to look at her face or else he'd throw up. His gaze returned to the road, which was smoothly rolling by at seventy miles per hour.

"I dunno," he mumbled.

"Is he...?" Gwen couldn't say it, as if even thinking it would diminish Ben's chance of recovering.

_It's very possible. But a toss like that shouldn't kill him unless it was a vertical drop._

But he had seen Ben hit the slope pretty hard...

Kevin cast those thoughts out of his mind. _Not down that road._ He created a plausible-sounding answer.

"Definitely not. I tested his pulse back where we found him. It's really soft, and his breathing's like a broken fan. But he's alive, somehow. He might be in a coma, though..."

Gwen sniffled audibly this time. Kevin gleaned a reply from that sad snort. _That's just as bad as him being dead._

Kevin's voice hardened. "He'll be fine. I'll... I'm... I promise."

The guilt hit him again. This time, worse than ever. But he swallowed it and concentrated on the road like his life depended on it.

"We've got to get him to an emergency room, somewhere. Use your phone and look for a hospital in the tri-county area."

Gwen nodded and pulled out a small tablet-like device. After a few minutes of worried tapping, she found an all-hours medical center in a city they passed on the way up that afternoon.

Remembering the location she mentioned, Kevin replied, "We'll be there in a half hour."

* * *

Gwen locked up the car for Kevin while he slung Ben over his shoulder. The action was met with a glare, but Kevin shrugged as much as he could. _It probably isn't good for his neck,_ Kevin paused, _but then again, I don't have a stroller in the trunk._ Gwen had already started walking ahead of him. _Especially for fifteen-year-olds_. Kevin shifted Ben's body off his shoulder and into his arms, lifting this limp teenager like a set of weights.

They walked through the parking lot. It was now extremely early morning, and the temperatures reflected it. So cold was it that walking into the air conditioning of the hospital felt like a rush of heat.

As the sliding doors closed automatically behind them, Kevin leaned to his left and started to whisper. "Remember not to..."

He was going to remind Gwen to not immediately give out her information and story so easily. However, the moment the hospital staff got a glimpse of Ben's pale unconscious face, a but a flock of nurses and attendings swooped down on the trio.

The next few minutes were a blur. Kevin did most of the talking (improvisationally) while Gwen just stared apprehensively at her cousin laying on a stretcher.

"He fell out of a car. The door must not have closed all the way. We took him back hame, and he said he was tired, so we just let him go to bed."

With hardly any inspection, they tossed the stiff boy into a room and began taking care of them. Before being calmy directed to an uncomfortable waiting room, Kevin and Gwen remained standing outside Ben's room to see what sound bites they could catch.

"... internal bleeding ..."

"... broken legs..."

"... damaged spine..."

"... dangerous concussion..."

"... head trauma..."

"... broken ribs..."

"... circulatory problems..."

"... that damned watch..."

Not too happy of an outlook. A sad-looking nurse directed them into a waiting area after hearing the doctors discuss the Omnitrix. Gwen, as cousin, was handed an information sheet but idly refused to look at it at Kevin's request.

They guessed why they were led away from Ben's room. A couple of minutes later, while Kevin was pacing up and down the empty hall, he saw Ben's being wheeled out of his room. He immediately dashed back to Gwen and told her that Ben was heading into surgery. Her face whitened and her mouth hung open.

"It...er...ah...must...b-bb-be...bad."

Kevin bit his upper lip and sat down next to her. "Yeah." _Oh, hell yes._

Meanwhile, Ben was just going into surgery. He was already under, and the doctors we terrified of giving him any drugs fearing his incredibly light breathing would simply stop as a result. He was in bad shape. The doctors had made a proper diagnosis with the internal bleeding, though. Terrible damage had been done to his nervous system, too... he'd be lucky if he ever woke up.

That's what they were afraid of most. This kid was innocent, or he appeared that way. His condition - represented visually - probably looked like a stock chart of the Great Depression.

Their fear was justified. At 1:21 AM, partially through an attempt to remove a chunk of rib jabbed in his left lung, Benjamin Tennyson's breathing halted. The surgeons were shocked at the sudden stop, although had had almost no statistical chance in the first place.

Ben was dead.

* * *

The room was about twice as cold as the frigid air outdoors. Sterile air was pumped in, and the same air was pumped out. It had an acrid smell and stank slightly.

It was a very specific room, for a very specific purpose. The room was part of a morgue. As nasty and upsetting as death gets. And that summer morning, at approximately a quarter till two, Ben Tennyson was rolled in. He had been undressed and cleaned, zipped in a body bag like some gruesome leftover. They had made their darndest attempt at removing the Omnitrix. It didn't budge, as we all know. The doctors gave up on it eventually knowing that the arm it sat on was his only unbroken limb. Well, at least, at the last time they saw him.

His clothes were neatly folded and placed on the far side of the room to be dealt with the following morning. On the stack was his cell phone, a wallet, a pair of keys, and a page of contact information pulled from his cousin and gathered from his phone.

The lights were off and the door was locked. The room was practically sealed tight. Nothing in, nothing out.

And, at 3:31 AM, something terrifying happened. A single light pierced the darkness. It was an amber glow, hardly any brightness at all. But it was accompanied by something else entirely. Closed tightly in a body bag and proclaimed legally dead one minute after his heart stopped, Ben Tennyson did something.

This, alone, is something incredibly odd for a dead person to do by very definition. The expression "dead as a doorknob" comes to mind since, well, doorknobs don't do anything.

They certainly don't take long, refereshing, life-bringing breaths. And Ben Tennyson - dead as a doorknob, so to speak - did just that. He sharply took in breath, realized he was naked, sat bolt upright, and screamed long and loud.

He gathered his situation slowly and methodically, panting like a dog running on its chain for a day. He found his way out of the canvas bag - I didn't say all _too_ tightly - and sat up on the gurney. He felt out of breath for obvious reasons, so he just sat up and looked around for a minute.

Ben had absolutely no idea where he was, but his exposed skin was crawling like mad and he was shivering wildly. His face was lit up by the now-bright glow of his Omnitrix. He felt extremely stiff, like he had slept while in a way-too-smal box.

Safely assuming nothing alive was around him, he stretched. Very well, too. His neck popped, vertebrae snapped, and legs snapped.

Not in bone structure, though. In fact, he felt great, if not a little clammy. So, now it was time to get some clothes and get out of this frozen hellhole.

The light of the Omnitrix would function great as a makeshift flashlight, he turned it to the room around him. He immediately turned it back and began shivering again. Bodies. Dead bodies. He yelled once again, although Ben had gathered nobody was around.

Ben realized where he was, he just wasn't sure how. The last thing he remembered... well, what was the last thing he remembered? He couldn't remember, honestly, because of the fear rocketing up and down his spine. He didn't want to put out his fake flashlight again, fearing some demonic creature would be staring him back instead of rows of rows of body bags and blissful corpses. So, he decided against it.

The resurrected hero walked backwards until he found a wall. Using his hand, he carefully inched his way around the room. He hoped dearly both to find a light switch and that the morgue was organized enough so that he didn't collide with a corpse on his way.

Thankfully for his sanity, both wishes had come true. After five minutes of shivering baby steps, Ben reached the front of the room where the light switch and door were. The lights came on dreadfully slow, but revealed no demons. Just bodies. _Ugh._ Bodies.

He came across his pile of clothes, and put them back on. He slid phone, wallet, and keys in his pockets, folding the information sheet and putting it in his jacket pocket. He looked around, coming across how he got there. _Was I... dead?!_ His thoughts were still primitive and brief at this point, mind you.

Ben decided that he could resolve all these pressing questions once he left the horrifying place. He grabbed the freezer-like handle to the door, twisted it, and peeked out. Nobody was in this hallway, so he quickly flicked off the lights and made his exit.

Ben was not a stupid guy, even if he had just come back to life. He assumed that, if he had actually died, hospital staff would be fairly surprised to see him. He made around every corner like a weaponless James Bond, narrowly missing some on-call nurses scurrying by him. To his luck, there was an exit to the outside on the other side of the floor. It would've sucked if he had to go to ground floor to get out; he almost certainly would have been seen.

The teenager enjoyed his first couple of breaths of fresh breath, and worked out his situation. He remembered every second of that night up until hitting the ground. Seeing his current situation, he had made a couple of conclusions. Their enemies must have been defeated that night, and Kevin and Gwen must have found him. Both good news.

Ben made sure nobody was around him, and decided that he should take a proactive approach to reentering the world of the living. He pulled out his phone and dialed a single number, and pressed the green button.

* * *

In light of that nights' events, Kevin had taken (as usual) to speeding down the deserted highways. Gwen lifelessly stared out the window, tear rivlets having already made their way across her face.

Kevin was glaring at the road, concentrating only on that black stretch of tarmac; he knew that, if he thought of absolutely anything else, the guilt would flood back.

His cell phone rang. He let it ring a couple of times, then assumed it had to be important if they had not hung up. He looked at Gwen, although she was still staring at the unchanging desert.

The driver hit the same button he had before, piping the call through his stereo and making the entire car into his microphone. He answered tonelessly. "Hello."

No response except some unidentifiable breathing.

"Hello?! Who is this?"

Kevin reached to hang up, but instead pulled sharply off the road and into the sand. This time a response had been made.

"Um, hello?" A familiar voice. "Is this Kevin?"

Kevin's face screwed up, and his eyes closed tightly. "What... the... hell!"

* * *

A/N: Enjoy. Thanks for all the reviews and know that I'm not anywhere near done.


	4. Exhausted

**Viral Chapter 4: Exhausted**

* * *

_"Frank, to be honest, I don't think anything could happen to those kids. They're invincible." _Carl Tennyson to Frank Tennyson, e-mail, 12:32 PM

* * *

"Can this thing go _any _faster?" Gwen hissed once again to the driver although she was clutching the sides of her seat.

Kevin managed to snort and smirk simultaneously. His sarcastic response audibly brought out his New York accent. "Watch it. You cussed me out four hours ago for breaking the speed limit trying to _get_ your zombified cousin to the hospital. This time, he's not gonna die. Trust me, it's actually the opposite."

Gwen pouted and punched the driver in the shoulder. Kevin playfully pushed it off; had it been anybody else on planet Earth, he probably would've ended up breaking her knuckles by making his shoulder all metallic in a millisecond.

But it was Gwen, so he didn't. Consequently, Kevin pushed down a little bit harder on the gas. The speedometer crept over one-fifty.

The passenger sat backwards in her seat, crossing her arms and smiling. The debate team was obviously a good investment of time.

The mood inside the car had, obviously, improved since the most recent phone call.

After all, they were under the impression that Ben was dead.

Rightfully so.

Meanwhile, twenty miles away and closing fast, Ben Tennyson walked swiftly up the interstate. He pondered his situation, and was pretty satisfied to find that they're wasn't that long a list of people who would be happy to discover he had died. That's good news.

_Julie certainly wouldn't be happy._

Ben grinned at this, and cheered alone to the desert around him. He enjoyed everything that was going on, despite his surroundings. It was the dead of night, the temperatures was frighteningly cold, the air was bone-dry, and there wasn't a thing in sight for miles. But it was great!

Except for one thing. Just one thing. It had bothered Ben since he... um... "woke up." The Omnitrix, of all things. While he didn't expect it to be totally accepting of the whole coming back to life thing - or his death in the first place - he had expected it to, you know, work. But it wasn't. It still had that same orange glow that mimicked the single street light from over six hours prior.

And now it began to speak. This stopped surprising Ben weeks before, but what it said made him pause.

"Genetic anomaly detected."

Ben rolled his eyes and looked around quickly. After all, nobody was around, so it must've been referring to him. And, since he was alone, he decided to talk back.

"Oh, really?" The teenager tapped it, although all of the buttons and twists and turns he could think of had no effect.

_Meh, whatever._ Ben continued walking.

"Genetic anomaly detected."

"You're telling me."

"Genetic anomaly detected." As it turned out, the soft modulated voice got annoying only on its third attempt.

"Shut up." Ben smacked the side of the device. Its sleeker profile - resultant of a little prying and tinkering with a screwdriver - was just as confusing as the original model. Go figure.

This time, it responded differently. "Attempt repair?"

Ben immediately didn't like the idea of the Omnitrix screwing around with his genes. _Well, not any more than necessary,_ he firmly decided. He pointed at the wristwatch-like toy as if it was a misbehaving dog, as if to scold it. "No. Absolutely not. Never. False. Cancel command."

He looked up from the unchanged piece of alien technology, hearing a noise. His face lit up; he saw a large black box with headlights emerge from the darkness. More accurately, it was Kevin's car, and Ben flagged it down wildly. The vehicle slowed to a stop, and the window nearest him rolled down.

The driver leaned over his cousin and grinned out the window. "Hey, dude, I usually don't pick up hitchhikers... but get in. I heard on the radio that there's some zombies roaming around here."

Ben rolled his eyes and headed to the back door. It was locked, but he heard Kevin's voice drift out the window right before the mechanical click of the lock: "Naw, man, I was thinking you could ride on the bottom!" He got in and promptly flopped on his back.

Gwen spun around and stared at him, suddenly unsure if this was real.

"How's your legs?"

Ben gave her his signature 'What are you, nuts?' look and bent his knees up and down. "Just fine, thanks. Yours?"

She shrugged. This certainly was Ben, rudeness and all. Kevin turned the car around and went back the way they came once again. Gwen filled him in on what happened after he got _knocked out_ (as it was referred to).

The car lapsed into an awkward silence.

"Well, not a very eventful evening, I would say," Ben broke it.

Even with Kevin driving, both teenagers in the front seats reached around to smack Ben.

"Okay, hey, just kidding! Ow!"

* * *

_Yawn._ You have to be tired if your thoughts even interject yawns.

Ben Tennyson had been sitting in the exact same position for, I don't know, ten minutes. He was on the edge of his bed, shirtless and in a pair of boxers, holding on to his sheets as if they were holding him up. For the twentieth time in five minutes, Ben yawned.

Put simply, he was tired._ Note to self, _he thought.

He pushed himself off his bed, staggered a little, and stretched for a minute.

_No more late Sunday nights._

If it wasn't the second to last Monday of the ninth grade, Ben and Gwen would've opted to not go home, get in their beds, and wake up for school four hours later. But even when you're a superhero, teachers get suspicious when you're not there with ten days left of school. Moreso with parents at four in the morning.

Apparently, the stretching had been just too much for him. A rolling, throbbing headache shot around inside his head. Fighting the urge to crawl back into his bed, he stumbled out his bedroom door and baby-stepped the two feet's distance to his bathroom.

No matter what he was actually doing late at night, Ben secretly enjoyed having a late bus. It allowed him to wake up a half hour before school, jump in the shower, scarf down a quick breakfast, and walk outside to his doorstep and have the bus in his face. As a plus, both of his parents left for work by the time he even woke up. This morning, it seemed a stretch to even do his simple routine.

Ben woke up slightly when he accidentally stepped into a hundred-degree torrent of steam. Hand-eye coordination is not exactly improved with sleep deprivation. Scalded but refreshed, Ben leaped out of the shower to turn the cold faucet on and got back in.

Minutes later, he stepped out of the shower, waved steam out of the air, and toweled off. He then wrapped the towel around himself and walked back to his room.

The boy pulled a fresh outfit from his closet and threw them on, then walked over to his standing mirror to check his hair.

What he saw, though, made his blood run cold. His skin prickled with goosebumps.

_No, _he thought, _that can't possibly be right._

His eyes stared right back at his. That was the problem.

Ben continued to stare, leaning in closer to the glass.

Something was wrong. He leaned in closer.

He was, specifically, looking at the color of his eyes. Or lack thereof. His iris - usually a starburst of lime green - was entirely missing. Gone. No whirls, curves, nothing. Just a curved, white cornea that was just a bit bloodshot toward his nose. His pupils were oddly small for the dimness of his room.

They were just empty pinpoints of blackness.

* * *

Fifteen minutes later, Ben Tennyson walked out of the front door of his house. He made sure that the door was safely locked up behind him. Then, Ben flipped a pair of dark sunglasses up onto his face and looked up just in time to see his bus finish turning out his neighborhood fifty yards up his street.

He uselessly began to dash after it while cussing and screaming, but a voice stopped him.

"Need a ride?"

Twenty feet away from his driveway already, Ben spun around on his heel to see Kevin leaning lackadaisically on the driver door of his car. The late high-schooler heard characteristically apt music drifting from the rolled-down car window.

"I set your alarm clock five minutes late."

Ben's brow furrowed. "Stalker, much?" He looked off to the distance for a second, vaguely remembering how Kevin had pretty much tossed his fatigued self onto his bed after the three got back into town earlier that morning.

"It was Gwen's suggestion," the ex-con replied sourly.

_Figures, but I'll ask anyway._ "Why is that?"

"I dunno, she wants to 'talk'."

He groaned inside his head. "You mean command me to do something?"

Another voice spoke. "I heard that!"

Ben bobbed his head surprisedly for a second, bit his lip, and looked at Kevin, whose expression returned to his 'Ha-ha. I made you look like a retard!' smirk.

"Oh, she's in the car."

The guy in black sucked his teeth. "_Really_ using that brain of yours, huh?"

Ben fought the sudden urge to sock him in the jaw, but that meant he'd probably have to walk to school. Sighing, he flopped onto his accustomed back seat.

"Shades? Really, Ben?" Gwen laughed.

Improvisation was not Ben's thing. He shrugged. "It's the... end of school?"

Gwen waved it away. _Phew._

_

* * *

_

A/N: Hope you like it. I can't appreciate your reviews enough! And yes, while alert adds help me, they don't help nearly as much as a review does. :-D

BTW... While some of you think this may have the characteristics of one, Viral is _not_ a slashfic. As I wrote to one reviewer: Trust me, if I ever write a slashfic, you and all of my other readers have my personal permission to come find me and chop my fingers off. Practically: I'm not very creative at describing Kevin's harassment of Ben - or any bullying, at that - so it might end up sounding a little... strange. Like a slash. But it's not; I'll leave it at that. Thanks.


	5. Shades

**Viral **Chapter 5: Shades

* * *

_"What? No. These kinds of 'cases', if you call them that, are kinda swept under the rug. We don't want to publicize that our med staff at two in the morning was slack enough to think that an injured teenager had died. Even worse for the state of our equipment. If the kid got out of here by himself, good luck to him. Those charts weren't good and we had a hell of a time getting him a transfusion."_ -- Dr. G. Richmond, Chief of Medicine, to an Investigator

* * *

_Are the sunglasses too obvious?_

He left his thoughts for a second, looking out the window. Suburban houses blurred by in a way that couldn't possibly be safe. At this rate, they'd be at school in a few seconds.

_Of course they are. You've worn sunglasses, like, once this entire school year._

He paused, making sure to snap back to false attention.

_Well, I have a baseball cap in my locker... would that work better._

Ben Tennyson was talking to himself, although he was trying to make less than blatant that he was ignoring what his cousin was saying. Ben had long gotten used to Gwen's form of talking. Unlike other girls, she summed up what she was going to say in the first two minutes of her mini-speeches and then went into the further details.

Needless to say, Ben had been quite satisfied with himself at this discovery. He was also overjoyed at finding that almost every other girl did the opposite.

In other words, the hero was quite content within own thoughts.

_Nah, this'll have to do. I couldn't make an excuse for wearing a baseball cap except bad bedhead._

Unless, of course, he's brought out of them like this:

"Got that, Ben?"

He looked directly into his cousin's eyes instead of through them, repressed the urge to drool "Huh?" confusedly, and lied through his teeth. "Uh-huh. Yeah. Of course."

_Don't tell anyone; hey you're a bit pale... blah-blah-blah... don't try the Omnitrix today; don't fall asleep, we were out late... yadda yadda... be careful around your parents after school today..._

Apparently his last sentence had the tiniest undetectable twinge of sarcasm, for Gwen had picked up on it.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Her eyes narrowed. "Were you even listening to me?"

Silently cussing himself, Ben looked to Kevin for help. Taking the opportunity as he usually would, Kevin denied the request for rescue. "Y'know Gwen, I don't think he was."

Acknowledging that, somehow, as Ben's answer, Gwen got angry. Her voice sharpened and her glare felt like hot knives.

"Would... you like me... to... start over?"

Ben made a split-second decision to lie through his teeth. "No, naw, are you nuts?! I heard every word."

Gwen bit her lip, wanting badly to say something, but instead glanced out the window. "Oh, look, we're here."

Kevin snorted. "Lucky you didn't get me pulled over, bein' turned around like that."

The girl rolled her eyes and snapped open the passenger door. Ben did the same.

"They couldn't possibly have seen me turned around with my seatbelt off considering you must've looked like a black-and-green blur."

Gwen was already fast-walking her way into the school building, while Ben was sleepily trudged his way up the sidewalk.

Kevin still hadn't moved; he rolled down the his window and shouted to the exhausted ninth-grader. "Hey, man, don't get yourself killed today!" Ben glared. "What?" Kevin continued to jest. "Hey, did your mom back you brains for lunch?" Not waiting for an answer, he sped off, laughing annoyingly all the way.

_Wow, he really thinks he's funny._

* * *

The man looked spooky from a distance, if that could be said. He was tall, hunched, and generally leaned on everything. He had a scraggly beard and his skin was pale in the way that he'd just look like a lobster if he even attempted to become tan. His face appeared in an eternal shadow; his cheeks were pinched slightly inward like he was sucking a lemon and his eyes were sunken into his face. Tiny black stubble crawled from ear to ear like ants.

The man smelled ever-so-slightly of death and noxious bodily fluids, though nobody would really ever bring it up. While he prided himself on being a strict vegetarian, the pale-skinned man managed to simultaneously look full-bodied and like his skin was an oversize suit wrapped around his skeleton.

He was friends with almost everyone (that is to say, he was friendly). However, most people he interacted with had a nagging "Wow, he's creepy" thought at the back of their minds after speaking with him.

Most of the above description had a specific, shared cause.

It was his job.

He wasn't ashamed of it, but he wasn't all too proud of it either. He wished dearly that somebody would whisk him away to a different position, but he was stuck. Stuck in the deep, chilly, and - well - dead depths of the morgue.

So, he would go about his seemingly mindless job each day. He would diagnose, catalog, prepare, and generally oversee the recently deceased. He was the not-thought-of middleman between the doctors and the funeral home. Never had this man lost or misplaced a corpse - this he also prided himself on.

Which was why, this sunny and dry morning, the pale mortician was hunting for a dead fifteen-year-old.

Specifically, he was hunting for Ben Tennyson. By all accounts, Ben was as dead as a doornail. No resuscitation attempted, time of death 1:22 AM. No exceptions. Get used to it. This confused the man the most. The boy seemed to have just gotten up and walked out of the hospital. Which, well... you get it.

After a few hours of receiving the same answers from doctors and surgeons, he asked one of the nurses if they had gotten any information about the boy before his... death. Which was a stupid question, because _his _job was cataloging.

After more runaround, he finally got a search run in the tri-county area for his medical information. He was returned a single sheet of paper with contact information. The lonely guy groaned.

_Well_, the man guessed. _Somebody needs to visit the Tennyson family._

* * *

"Mr. Tennyson?"

_Damn! Of all people to notice me, it's going to be him._

Ben had somehow gotten down the hall, to his locker, through homeroom, and to his first class while evading any sort of incident. It would make sense, then, that his jerk of a history teacher would notice his sunglasses. The man was old, angry at the world, and smart-alecky all in one wrinkly, tweed-jacketed form.

It was no use, as everybody in the room had already whipped around to stare at him. Ben's face went red instantly, and he half groaned, half mumbled. "Yes, sir?"

"Are you wearing sunglasses in **my **classroom?"

Classmates snickered. Even Ben couldn't help it, a small smirk turned at the edges of his lips. _No, sir, your eyes just blocked parts of me out you nasty old..._

"Yes, sir."

More giggling. The anger was clearly rising in his voice as Ben was clearly sinking in his seat.

"May I ask... _why_?!"

Ben still hadn't prepared an answer even though he expected more people to question him. So, he once again came up with something totally random and...

"Eye surgery."

"What?!"

"Well, kinda," Ben babbled. "I got flashed in the eyes yesterday evening with... one of those laser pointer things... um, yeah... and, anyway, I had to go to the emergency room and, um, get some other laser stuff done to fix 'em."

Most of the people accepted his improvisational answer, including the teacher. Others that were more experienced themselves with lying laughed at his quick story, but gave it up.

The teacher, however, cooled. "Oh, well... students, this shows the how you should never screw around with laser pointers. Thank you for serving as an example, Mr. Tennyson. Now sit down before I give you a detention."

Ben hadn't realized he had subliminally stood when the teacher was probing him. Whoops. He collapsed with a sigh into his seat and continued to read the study guide for his exam, peeking out from under his shades to do so. He would check every couple of minutes to make sure nobody was watching him.

Which, by the way, he wasn't very good at. His oh-kind-of-maybe-sometimes girlfriend was peeking at him from the corner of the room, amused but concerned.

She would later corner him at his locker.

"What's up with you?"

She had approached on the open side of his locker. Ben was just about to close the door, but instead paused and peeked around the side at her. He was still awkward about approaching her at school, even though he had done it tons of times. His mouth switched to an 'O' of surprise. "Hiya!"

Ben held his books by his side. Julie closed his locker for him. During school hours, she tended to talk as if eternally writing a text message. That is, she had no reservations occasionally using an online shorthand (LOL was her favorite) or talking criminally fast. "?"

In respone, Ben smiled. Julie's secret weapon was that she sounded a lot less smart than she actually was. "Oh, nothing really. I really did hurt my eyes, so I have to wear these."

She stared into his shadowy eyes, getting real close. Ben caught a wiff of her hair, which smelled overpoweringly of grass. She was smiling, her spotless face gleaming. "Ben, you should know by now. You're a terrible liar."

Ben grinned sheepishly for a moment down at her. He then bit his lip, knowing that if she probably wouldn't take it well if he gave in to the urge to tell her what happened the previous night. "Fine. Something happened on a trade mission, okay? Something bad."

Her look of concern deepended. She lifted his right arm, twisting the peach-colored Omnitrix into the air while raising an eyebrow.

"Yes. Very much so."

Julie dropped his arm, where it limply fell to his side. "You're so, like, James Bond."

"I'm not thinking so anymore. Something weird's happening. Please don't ask, it's something dangerous."

She gave up. "Fine."

Ben changed the subject. "So, um, you wanna go do something tonight? Maybe pizza?"

"With or without sunglasses?"

_Ha. _"That question... still hasn't been answered."

"How about pets?"

"My dog still hasn't come back."

They laughed.

"How about, 6:30?"

"My place?"

* * *

The man fumbled with a cigarette in his mouth as he walked outside the grocery-store-style doors. Humid air bathed over him. He had a mission: in the hand not satisfying its body's perpetual need for nicotine, he held a ring of keys and a slip of paper.

As he walked into the parking lot, he clicked a button on his keyfob. Fifteen feet away, a pair of headlights on a compact car flicked on in the daylight. The man lazily walked over to it and got in the driver's side, smashing the cigarette outside with his left foot.

He sat down, shut the door, and immediately gasped. Sitting in the passenger side was a young black woman, smiling from ear to ear at him. He smiled back at her and exhaled. "Jesus, Tabitha, don't scare me like that!"

She cackled and whacked him across the ribs. "Come on, Andy, don't be such a scaredy-cat."

The man known as Andy rolled his eyes. "Why are you here, though?"

The girl feigned a look of hurt. Her thin, dark face twisted into a sad frown and her thick bottom lip stuck out. "Aw, you were taking a road trip and I wanted to come!"

"How did you get off?" She patted her forest-shaded scrubs like she had a plan.

"I got the other nurses to cover for me. You should be happy! Anyways, why are **you **taking this trip?"

Andy looked thoughtful for a moment, realizing her point. "I dunno. I have this weird feeling... about that missing kid. Like this is some really messed up stuff."

Her lips pursed. "Alright then. Fine, I'm coming because you're not a people person."

As he started the car, the passenger probed with a question. "How awkward will this be? Did you even think that you're going to see the family of a dead kid?"

The man snorted. "That's just the problem. Or... not the problem."

The awkward duo backed out of the parking lot and putted down the sun-baked road in their ant-sized car.

* * *

A/N: Have fun, please R&R. Sorry it took so long.


	6. Sheepish

**Viral Chapter 6: Sheepish**

* * *

"Ugh!"

That was all Ben Tennyson could say. However, the emotion behind his limited speech counted just as well as a couple of minutes of out-and-out screaming like a toddler.

The boy's shoulders were tense and hunched. His arms hung motionless at his sides, with his left hand facing outward in an exasperated way and his right hand clutching the strap to an awkwardly hanging duffel bag. Ben was wearing a baggy, old pair of gym shorts and a loosely fitting gray T-shirt.

He shook his head from left to right rapidly, flinging muck from his hair. The boy could feel it running down his back slowly and with prickly steadiness.

During the second half of his school day, heavy rain had fallen around town. Which made sense in a twisted way, as it was a day his science class was preparing to go outside for a lab activity. Something, I'll add, only happens a handful of times in 180 days.

Anyways, In Ben's neighborhood, heavy rain had the tendency to create mud with such concentration of dirt and junk that it resembled a mix of molasses, wet cement, and black paint. Just as bad, the mess stank of whatever stormwater runoff had soaked into the ground - which, on any given day, was made up mostly of pet urine, leaking garbage, and a colorful assortment of lawn fertilizing chemicals.

And Ben's bus was stuck in a pothole of this disgusting mess. As we all know, when vehicles (busses, doubly so) get stuck in muddy holes, the driver tends to try and pull out by sheer force of their mighty gas pedal. Which, for the poor person standing anywhere near the stuck tire, is very unfortunate.

Despite his failed attempt to warn the bus driver, Ben Tennyson was the unfortunate one who stepped off his bus, took a right turn, and walked up the sidewalk in the direction of his house that lay a couple of hundred yards away. Just as he was passing the rear tire, the bus made its own attempt to pull away.

Which splattered him with the nasty road gunk, covering most of his front above his pair of grass-stained cleats. As if things could screw up anymore that day.

To save himself further embarassment, and while hiding his frustrated but dejected look behind his sunglasses and facial mud mask, Ben flung off some more of the earthen mess and speed-walked up the cement walkway towards his house. Distantly, the boy could hear the snickers of a dozen generic teenage males back on the bus, doubtlessly pointing and laughing at him.

A couple of minutes later, Ben would storm into his house. He bolted into the kitchen and threw his bag and the contents of his pockets onto a counter, duly sticking with a gross _thwack_. He would next run upstairs to his bathroom.

Ben had spent over two and a half hours hanging out on the soccer field at school, practicing with his teammates. Count in thirty minutes of transportation time, and that only left him with a half hour until Julie got over. _"Her idea of 'not being late' is 'thirty minutes early,'"_ he reminded himself.

The teenager dashed past his parents coming up the stairs, narrowly missing the two bemused adults. Ben would quickly strip down to jump in the shower.

Tossing his clothes into a rounded hamper and climbing into the shower, Ben realized that he must've set the shower to _'Arctic chill.'_ Knowing he was still sweaty and flushed from his prolonged sporting session, though, Ben let the shiver-inducing jets run over him.

After half a bottle of scented body wash and twenty minutes of furious scrubbing, the pungent mud began to _flop_ - not wash - off. It took considerable effort to make sure there was no trace of the blackened sludge - or, worse, its nasty odor - on his now-icy and clammy skin.

Hurrying to get done, Ben shut off the water and reached out behind the rough plasticky shower curtain to grab a towel. The now-clean athlete hastily dried himself, wrapping the towel around his waist when done.

At this point, he saw something odd. He had come to the door to dash across the hall into his room to put on a clean outfit, but glanced into the mirror for a split second.

... And, then, he looked back. This time the defect wasn't optical, (although his corneas had returned, they were not with his accustomed lime green but instead a metallic gray) it was, um... his hair. For a second, he thought it was a remainder of the mud that had caused the effect, but that was possible unless somebody had poured a bottle of hair gel into the pothole directly prior to his bus entering it.

Ben Tennyson's hair stood straight up in a spiky pattern that could only be done with careful grooming and consistent gelling. His normally thick brown hair stood in a way that could only be rivaled by a very professional - and, as another side note, very gay - cosmetologist. Bewildered and kind of freaked out (although 'freaked out' stood nothing in his latest string of issues), Ben proceeded to slowly get back in the shower after making a futile shot at slicking it down. Once the water had come back on, he promptly used a very large handful of shampoo to attack his spiky head.

Once he was certain the problem was solved, the boy repeated his drying routine and watched - literally, watched - as his pathetically flattened hair rose into the exact same position - perfectly spiked with an artistic (and, again, very gay) inverted wave in front. Once again bewildered, the hero ran his fingers through his unmoving mass of brown to see what was in it. He removed his hand and put it over the sink, which had weirdly been doused in a bright green slime.

Shaking his head as if finally accepting he had gone nuts, Ben rinsed off the slimy mess, gripped the towel and ran into his room. He had only just finished pulling on a pair of jeans and a characteristically apt jacket he had from his school year's previous flurry of sports fury (baseball, this time - colored, of course, in green and white) when he heard the door bell ring.

Ben was down the stairs and had said speedily to his father, "," before the polo-shirted civil engineer could finish breathing in to call his son's name. Breathless, he stole the doorknob from his father's approaching hand, opened the large front door just enough to squeeze himself out and pulled the door shut behind him.

Realizing what an idiot he was, Ben sheepishly made the _one-minute-please_ finger and snuck back into his house so as to grab his phone, wallet, and house keys. This effectively left his girlfriend a quick moment to swallow the laugh which had spent no time rising up her windpipe. He quickly grabbed the items, wheezed an apology to his parents for the quick exit, and walked back out the door.

"Uh... hi there, Julie."

He walked off the porch and motioned for the amused girl to follow. "So, erm, the shop of this guy Giovanni - a war buddy of my grandpa's - is only a few blocks away, right at the start of town."

"My girlfriends go to Giovanni's all the time..."

"Oh, cool. We might see them."

"... but I seem to remember it being on the opposite side of town that you're thinking of."

Ben mentally cursed her, but forced an embarrassed smile. "We'll walk fast, then." He didn't really have the heart to mention that he couldn't fly her or something; he also noted the incredible lack of planning in this spontaneous date but, thankfully, she wasn't thinking in that ballpark at all.

After all, the two shared an unspoken agreement that it was a _very_ lucky accomplishment that their parents hadn't barred them from seeing one another after their first date. As a result, they planned time together increasingly often under the condition that it was feasible to both of their 'schedules' and - to their parent's relief - on a school night.

"What, did you get on your _buddy_ Kevin's bad side?" Julie desperately fought the urge to look Ben in the eye and use the nickname Spike, put it passed.

Ben snorted. "No. He's probably with Gwen somewhere trying to _woo_ her." Although she easily detected his sarcasm, Ben nodded yes to her shocked visual response without hesitation. Of course, the surprised look more likely had its root in that Ben had shared intimate details with Julie (at her request, oddly) of the whole story of Kevin's mutated sociopath antics.

"Naw, it's probably true, but they'd both fry me if they heard that." Julie smirked up at him a white hybrid crawled by them.

They were nearing the end of the housing development, where the scenery would quickly transition into the rustic Main Street equivalent of their town. It was almost summer, so the sun still hovered reasonably high in the west. Ben's overpowering scent of soap hung in the air with fresh undertones of grass.

"So, Ben, tell me. Is this 'weird stuff' you mentioned at school just going through a makeover?"

Ben cracked up. "It seems like it, doesn't it?"

* * *

Meanwhile, the aforementioned car continued to creep up the drive, peeking at the bizarrely-placed house numbers as they went. Our hardly dynamic duo was getting weary and was realizing that bad timing was making their chances of getting anything accomplished steadily worse. Ignoring this, they puttered along.

The young woman of African descent in the passenger seat yawned. She was - sleepiness or not - looking out at all of the street numbers on her side of the street. "Andy, baby," she said lackadaisically with another yawn, "What do you think we're going to get done with this. It's seven thirty and we're about to barge in on a mourning family..."

The Andy being mentioned rubbed his unshaved stubble for the tenth time in a show of exasperation. Over the three-hour drive, Andy's neurotic brain convinced itself that Ben Tennyson was _not_, in fact, dead. Therefore, they'd just be awkwardly barging in on two perfectly normal parents and, possibly, their zombified son. He repeated this to the passenger he considered his girlfriend.

In response to this, she smiled wanly. She knew exactly what Andy was doing: he often worked himself up to a furor, totally convinced of something he was definitely not convinced of before.

"Anyways," the man said, "I have a friend in town that I called while you were asleep. He'd be glad to take us, unless you want to stay in a hotel room. But I think we might be getting back home tonight. It depends."

They both had a feeling about this little story - which Tabitha, the girl, reluctantly admitted partially in between their home and destination - which can easily explained by a good sense of intuition. Because, as it stands, their hunch was totally right.

All of the sudden, they got close. The arrangement of the neighborhood was semi-awkward in that house numbers ping-ponged across the street despite the houses not being in any sense parallel.

The girl started: "Here we are; 2002."

The car inched a tiny bit faster, and the driver read the numeral of the house on his side. "2003."

"2004." Out of the blue, the short-haired nurse began to get uneasy.

"2005!" Andy spun the wheel to his left, and the car pulled smoothly in to the driveway in front of the Tennyson house. Although there was a single-car garage, three cars were in the driveway. One, of course, was theirs. The second, closest to the front door and hiding the other two, was a sky blue minivan. The third, in front of our duo, was a somewhat recent model of car in acid green that resembled a cop crusier.

Coincidentally, the door of the green cop-like car was open and a thin, tall man with black hair stepped out.

This man's name was Mark. If he ever told you his last name, it probably wasn't authentic. He was a tall but stocky figure in his early thirties, and at the present time, wearing a perfectly fitted pair of kahkis and a tucked-in button-up shirt and tie. The man wore a thin pair of glasses; the kind that subtly darken in sunlight and soften indoors. His jet-black hair resembled a crew cut that had grown for a couple of months unchecked.

If you eyeballed him and gave your first impression, it would probably be "male teacher." That description is a bit far off, though. His actual profession is a lot... well, cooler. Mark is a jack-of-all-trades, really, but he is a fantastic actor and professional liar. The checks deposited to his bank account have the header "United States Government."

So, yes, Mark was a G-Man. And a very good one at that. But he, of all people, was recruited specifically: for (and from) the organization that was, is, and followed that of the Plumbers. In effect, this guy was as close to Men in Black as you would see and still remember afterwards.

Mark was doing a special job today; one that was notably similar to the one Andy and Tabitha were doing: playing dressup detective. Granted, he knew how to play the part much better. But, why, you ask, was he visiting the Tennyson house that evening?

The official story was an expected one: Why wouldn't an investigative pulse be sent out after the mysterious nature of Ben Tennyson getting injured and dying? Shouldn't the police know? The real reason, though, was a much more appropriate one. You see, the functional equivalent of the Plumbers nowadays keeps constant tabs on a very specific list of people. They didn't track things like report cards and bank transactions, though. It was things like hosital visits - and, obviously, subsequent deaths - that rang alarms for this list.

Those of the Tennyson family that were still existing in this dimensonal plane and living on Planet Earth were conveniently on this alien watchlist. Not for something like flight risk, but strictly for "keeping them safe" purposes. Which, in light of recent events, was proved to have failed.

In any case, he was here now, at the Tennyson house. Of course, he didn't expect to be met by those who would clearly be suspicious. Oddly enough, it made things easier.

After a brief and awkward discussion about who was here for what, Andy and Mark resolved to all enter the Tennyson house simultaneously. The latter would use his (fake) police badge and the former his hospital identification.

Minutes later, the three were seated in the living room, with Ben's mom politely sharing bottled water and Ben's father scratching his head. Perhaps it was in anticipation of the, needless to say, _interesting_ discussion that followed.

* * *

A/N: Thanks for everything, everybody. I'd enjoy more reviews... but if you like it, there isn't much more to say that hitting that "favorite" or "alert" button, is there? Well, then, thanks for doing that. Oh, and a side note. I really wanted to get this chapter done, but haven't had time at all. And, while I thank all of my readers and appreciate their support and encouragement, I'd really like to thank reviewers "xangabell" and "vixen fire," whose late-breaking reviews really pushed me to get on the ball with this chapter. Even for them, it's five days later then promised, but, sigh...


	7. Trauma

**Viral Chapter 7: Trauma**

* * *

_"Yes. get home as soon as you can. Y did you 2 walk there?"_ Text message conversion between Julie Yamamoto and her mother, 7:32PM  


* * *

_Slurp. _The almost primal sound caused by the straw signaled the impeding end of his third smoothie. The cup continued to empty, echoing around empty space as the final dregs of strawberry, banana, pineapple, and soy milk were sucked through the wide plastic tube. Kevin carelessly tossed the paper cup into floor of the back seat, noticing that flecks of spit flew onto the back sear _right _where Ben usually lays his head. Wiping his smiling mouth with the back of his fist, he flexed his muscles and belched long and loud.

He paused, noting the smell of his breath and momentarily wondering when (if ever) he had last eaten a skunk. He shoved open his car door and stood up so as to stretch more, walking off without hesitation upon realizing how badly he needed to go to the bathroom.

Left behind was Gwen, who sat with her legs crossed on the reinforced roof of the aforementioned car. She was penning bits and pieces of her math homework into a brown notebook. It was late afternoon, and the sun was just starting to duck down behind the tallest buildings in town. It felt ever so slightly muggy, but the air was mostly dry heat that signaled the impending summer.

She suddenly heard a light whistle; Gwen looked up. Standing with her arms pushing onto the end of the car's bumper, a black girl of medium height, moderate weight, and carefully braided chest-length hair smirked up at the number cruncher.

The girl's voice bore a slight trace of big city intellect with an overwhelmingly sweet Bayou drawl behind it. She stretched out the ends of the words as the beginning of each sentence. "_Girl_, you got him taking you around everywhere, now! _Did _you hire him full-time as a chauffeur yet?"

Gwen duly noted the lack of a serious question. She put her books to the side, breathed in the fresh scent of irony, and brushed a straightened crimson hair out of her eyes. "No, he makes plenty of money on his own. Why do you ask?"

"_Gwen, _seriously! _You _have him wrapped around your finger!"

The teen laughed this time, and breathed in to respond. She was interruped.

"_Please,_ Gwen, don't even! _We_ girls see you two together all the time. I mean, come on, there's almost nothing you do where he ain't hangin' out with you."

The honor student on top of the car rolled her eyes. "Well... he's sleeping or breaking the law, or something... mostly."

"_No_ kidding. _Who _would've thought that Gwen Tennyson, the girl of "got-a-hundred-and-five-on-the-Calculus-exam-at-fifteen" fame, had a crush on a dropout!"

Gwen mechanically hissed: "I_don't_haveacrushonhim! And he's not..." She paused; neither of these points were techically true anymore. As far as the dropout thing goes, she hadn't really thought about that before. Did being in pan-dimensional jail for three years count for truancy? He had opted to not go back to school in favor of arms dealing. Of course, that wasn't _her _decision. Gwen decided to stop thinking about it; her companion was starting to raise her eyebrows.

"Anyways, we're not really here **together**; we're doing our own things. Very separately. I do my homeworks, and he... um... texts the entire delinquent population of the southwest."

The girl crossed her arms, waved her hair, and scoffed.

"_Right. I _know all about that. _And_ don't get yourself thinking this ain't a date, girl. _Tyrone_ and I come here almost every day, and we do nothing but hang out with our own friends. _We_ still call it a date."

Gwen smiled exasperatedly, mirroring her friend's smirk. "Come on, Gloria." She hadn't really told anybody that she and Kevin were going out, especially considering each chance she had to take him out somewhere was unceremoniously crushed. Was it that obvious? Hopefully not, but apparently so.

"_Are_ you going to be the girl that thinks she and her boyfriend still aren't 'being serious' when she gets proposed to?"

Gwen answered this surprisingly caustic question by getting off the car. She careful both to hide her embarrassment and to not accidentally use her powers to float off onto the ground. Despite this, the last inch of her drop finished with a spark of pink that mimicked the flushed color of her cheeks.

Her friend kept on talking, glancing at her feet with a suspicious (but knowing) pursing of her lips. "_Fine_, no answer, that's okay. _What _I mean is , what _do _him, you, and Ben do all the time? Julie doesn't say a word to me except for the mid-date text message, and that doesn't help me at all, 'cause it's usually something dumb or cryptic."

_I'm giving her a hug and five dollars to the Burger Shack the next time I see her._

The female Tennyson girl steadied herself, straightened her shirt, and found the needed retort. "Oh, you know, save the world and stuff."

Gwen's Plumber badge began to vibrate in her pocket. She didn't even think about it at all. The girl punched Gwen in the shoulder, happily ending that subject. The conversation went on to discuss local gossip for a couple of minutes.

After subtle prodding, though, Gwen decisively gave in to her friend. "Jeez, Gloria! Fine... I'm, um, going out with him, already!"

It caught two people off guard: Gloria (who promptly began spazilly fanning her face in shock like a sixty-year-old churchgoer) and Kevin (as this was just convenient enough of a time for him to be returning from the bathroom). Go figure: the ex-con heard the final statement just as he reentered hearing range. Kevin's face quickly grew a bright hot red, and he stood absolutely still. He continued to do this until realizing that his body was solidified with the cryllic neon green paint of his driver side door.

Embarrassed further, he looked around and jumped back in the car. He spent the next couple of minutes trying to coax the hollow casing off his arm and into the similarly painted dashboard while his mind raced frustratedly, ignoring the glowing of his haphazardly-placed Plumber badge on the center console.

* * *

"Um, so!" The boyish outburst was accompanied by a slightly sheepish grin.

"So..." Still a touch of awkwardness; it was that mid-dinner silence. The two were possibly the most quiet people in the entire restaurant. Even though it was only a Tuesday, the pizza joint was moderately full and the kitchen was bustling.

Ben and Julie had spent over ten minutes greeting friends before being able to sit down. The two still hadn't totally gotten down starting a conversation properly in public, despite everything else they'd done.

Ben received a couple of "WTF" looks for his stylish spike, but nothing else negative was gained except a nauseating dose of paranoia. _I might as well not even be wearing clothes. I could've come here in my boxers and it would've been accepted easier._

Julie seemed to have that feeling as well: "Nice time for a style change," she had joked, "was it either that or changing your jacket?"

While the two joked and conversed until ordering their food (which had been entirely decided upon by Julie - at Ben's request, for he couldn't afford anything more than a minimal amount of pizza toppings), the conversation quickly lapsed into a short silence as Ben stared around and Julie toyed with her cell phone (_ttyl, plz... im on a date!_).

"Er... um... ah ... can you... believe that exam we have Friday?"

The conversation seemed to have successfully restarted. "Ohmygosh, no **fricking **kidding. Mr. Gordon was acting, like, a Nazi today."

"I swear," Ben chuckled, "He has it in for all of us."

"Well, I wouldn't go that far. He's just our just History teacher. Don't you still have your study guides from the beginning of the year?"

Ben frowned, ignoring her second statement. "Fair point. But hey, I think we'll do just fine. Especially after we both passed Physics together."

"Duh... we, like, had to, since we spent three straight days studying."

"You're telling me. I'll never forget the cover to that textbook!"

"Ben, you slept on it," she flirted sarcastically.

"I didn't help me suck up any of that crap." He playfully smacked his forehead, and then cocked his ear toward the kitchen. "I think I hear the baker calling our order. You want a refill on your water before it gets here?"

Julie smiled. "Sure, why not, bat ears?"

Ben quickly tended to move into self-deprecating humor: "Must be the hair."

As Ben moved to get up and grab their two cups, he clumsily banged his knee into the underside of the table. The entire metallic stand shook a bit, sending Ben's unwrapped napkin filled with silverware flying onto the boy. To his infinite surprise, the knife was a slight bit sharper than normal and the serrated edge sliced part of his right wrist.

The fourteen-year-old hissed in pain; Julie leaped up and rushed over to see what happened. Despite the searing sensation of pain, he waved her off. "Hey, don't worry, I'm fine! There isn't even any blood!" He grabbed a handful of cardboard-like brown napkins from the dispenser on the side of the table and squeezed them around his wrist.

He grinned dizzily, suddenly feeling lightheaded despite his truthful lack of blood. "See, don't worry. Just fine!" Julie had her hand over her mouth in the way almost every girl does. She sighed with a light smile. "Gosh, Ben, you didn't have to try and kill yourself. I'll go get the drinks, you calm down and try not to hurt yourself."

Ben looked up at her with a frown, using his injured hand to wave. "Gee, thanks." He could hardly think of a way to further make a fool of himself. Maybe the whole "just-boxers" thing wasn't such a bad idea. While massaging the pain in his wrist away, he moved into the furthest corner of the booth and slouched down.

He gave a weak gesture and an unexpectedly exhausted "Thanks" when the sweaty guy a bit older than him brought him their pizza. A couple of minutes later, Julie returned with two waters ("Maybe it's the caffeine making you all jittery...") and a fresh outlook. Ben brightened at her return, ready to move beyond his earlier screw-ups and start having fun.

"Okay, cool, let me just throw this thing away and we can eat."

Something strange happened, then.

But more on that later.

* * *

The Tennysons were unsure of what to think of the people in their living room sipping bottles of purified water. The pale, nervous-looking guy and his companion both looked relatively honest; the purported detective was what really set off their alarms. At this moment, he was eyeing the greenish-black weapon hanging over their mantle.

"You know, Sandra, now that I think about it, hanging that blaster over the fireplace was a bit of a hazardous decision."

His wife sighed. "Current issue, dear."

Mr. Tennyson turned around. "Oh, right. Suspicious people. What should we tell them?"

"Well, he wants to know where Ben was last night."

"That'll be awfully hard considering that we don't even know," he said as he scratched his head.

As they argued lightly about this, another conversation went on in the other room.

"So, where are you all from again?" The man's voice was husky and gruff for his slight frame, and had a southern accent that they apparently hadn't picked up on before.

Andy picked up immediately, having already signaled to Tabitha his subliminal unrest with this guy: "A little ways out west. Plopped right on the northern edge of the desert. There's a medical center right around there."

"Ah. I take it you're here about the young Tennyson boy as well." He pronounced "boy" a little too heavy, live "baw."

"Um, well, yeah."

The mustached man, Mark, mumbled a little bit inconsistently with his out loud voice. "How convenient."

The Tennyson adults took the akward pause as a chance to enter.

"Ah, yall're back. I take it you've come to a consensus on my... uh, previous question." He sure liked that phrase.

Ben's father had a look of unease at this man's eager greeting. "You could say that."

His wife interrupted with a hint of sarcasm. "Listen, _sir_, we're not exactly eager to sound like parents of the year, but we don't know where our son was last night." She spoke clearly and seriously. A look of shock passed across the faces of the two medical staff (to which the male Tennyson gave them a pleading look) while a scowl of sureness crossed that of the G-man.

"I see."

Andy stammered into the conversation, feeling oddly like the man sitting on his right was about to pounce on the Tennysons. "I... um... erm... we... uh..."

Tabitha found her voice, and reason for coming. "Spit it out, babe."

Andy shot her a withering look, and dugg in his pocket. "Do... you... um... ah. This picture was taken... buh... early this morning by an... gah... intern for police... I think... department. I was personally wondering... heh, burning question... if you... know the... um... body here. In this photo. Right here... so. Yeah." He apprehensively held out the photo with two fingers. His eyes were closed.

His girlfriend's eyes widened as she caught a sideways glimpse. Mark, across the room, craned his neck in an attempt to see, pensively silent. Damn right, burning question.

Sandra Tennyson looked as she was holding back a scream. Her husband, cradling chin in hand, looked about as pale as his son did in the picture.

* * *

Ben's head was swimming with disjointed thoughts. He felt colder than should be possible. An attempt to move his limbs resulted in nothing. However, he could hear things fadedly and was under the impression he could talk.

He was vaguely aware that Julie hovered over him, maybe even held him. He was in a definitely darker place than the pizza shop. What was it? A basement? Alley?

Her voice faded in and out, repeating his name over and over at varying levels of alarm. His mind slowly began to realign (or fade out?!) as a whirring firmly entered his hearing. His sight solidified, as did his hearing. Everything was crystal clear.

He just couldn't move.

"Julie?" He attempt at speech was a miserable one. His voice seemed disconnected, tinny. It came out as a burble.

Ben slowly gained a sense of height and depth... or were those new?

He looked around, glad to find the he could move his head.

He saw Julie about a foot below him, a six-inch gain over their regular height difference. Her look was a mix of fear and awe.

"Ben... is that... are you okay?"

He made what he thought were the right movements to shake his head up and down. She reached up slowly, carefully, and touched his shoulder. It tickled. His recoiled slightly at the warm touch.

"Heyyyyyy! I'm fine, thanks!" The very same burble.

Julie glanced down and back up, her hair delicately moving with her both ways. She spoke calmly, and with the trace of a relieved smile.

"Good to know. I think. You scared me."

"Good." Same annoying burble. It really was starting to grate on his nerves, Ben thought normally and with no impairment.

"I mean, I'm still a little scared though."

"Why?"

"Nothing. Whatever you do, don't look down." She immediately regretted saying that, wincing and knowing she should have formed her words better.

"Why?" He looked down at the irresistably forbidden sight; he immediately knew why she didn't want him to see it. His body (wait, well... you'll see) shook in terror.

He wasn't exactly sure of what he was seeing, but it was screaming at him from all sides.

_That's your clothes, Ben. Wrapped around your skin._ Akward, terrifying thoughts.

"Ben, should I call somebody?" The fear was back, obviously out of her temporary shock.

"Y'know, I think so."

Ben burbled this as he collapsed into a puddle on the grimy concrete of the alley.

* * *

A/N: So frigging much for getting this up fast. Sorry. No, really I am. School. R&R, please!


	8. Phone Calls

**Viral **Chapter 8: Phone Calls

* * *

_"This is Mark... ehm, Anderson with the Federal Bureau of Investigation calling Investigator Stephens of the Elderby County Police Department. A strange case of yours has been brought to my attention that may be of serious importance to national security. My records indicate... what, PD-977594? Tennyson? Western Mercy Hospital? Please call me back immediately. Thanks." _12:15 PM, call left unreturned until ~5:00PM

* * *

"Gwen, what's Max's number? You need to call him."

"Kevin, I'm not going to call Grandpa Max."

His mind didn't miss a beat. _But there's a body in the back of my car!_ Kevin spoke rather spastically; his words were quick and jumbled like those of a person with stresses much more than his.

"Fine, then, what's his number again? I'm calling him. His house is just before the start of the interstate, right? I don't want to miss the turn and it's not like I've ever been to his house... I mean, I've only seen him at the garage before or roaming with the Plumbers' kids in the Rustbucket and..."

"Kevin, we're not going there. We just need to go to my house, or Ben's house, or your apartment. Or, better yet, back to the Mr. Smoothy. That sounds good. Turn around. We all just need to calm down and take this easy."

This was out of Kevin's field of experience, and it was really disconcerting to him. Sure, he'd dealt with weapons, crime, and, hell, alien prostitution... but not this. Not _bodies_. He unconsciously shivered and bit down on his lip before responding.

"Don't tell me to calm down; I don't need to be calmed right now, Gwen, I'm picture-perfect calm, Gwen!" He said her name the second time with an edge, in part realizing that he was starting to sound unstable.

The trees and road were starting to blur. Either they had just entered a time warp or Kevin was going really fast.

"Gwen, I..." Julie interjected, only to be cut off. She looked concernedly down at the plastic Wal-Mart translucent bowl adorned with plastic flowers on the sides and covered in shoddy plastic wrap. It was filled with green... erm, something. Whatever it was, it was Ben. Two piercing, round oversized metallic pills - eyes, one could guess - peered up at her from the top of the slimy slush. She had no idea how they, on a biological level, blinked - or even stayed a part of the body for that matter - but they did and it was really strange.

"Kevin, you're not calm at all. You sound like you're on something."

"I'm not."

"You have a lead foot."

"Funny you say that. 'Cause _I do_."

"You're going to get us killed!"

"That's interesting. You never say crap like that when _you're the one _freaking out! I'm driving just fast enough to not be followed! Besides, the road's empty. It's not like _you're_ going to be the one getting in trouble anyway, I'll just get another ticket and you'll snort and Ben'll laugh and I'll ignore it and..."

"Kevin, you're getting hysterical!"

He hissed and rolled his eyes, breathing in and out in sharp frustrated bursts. He was feeling as if his mother was in the passenger seat. Not that he'd seen her in, what, six years? Either way, a deep-seated dread began to settle at the bottom of his stomach.

As Gwen and Kevin motormouthed up front, Julie whispered downward, "Why won't you talk?" The eyes narrowed, as far as she could approximate; their width reduced slightly and slanted inwardly at the top.

"Kevin, come on, slow d..."

"GWEN!"

The shout stunned them all, all sound lapsing into a momentary silence punctuated by the hum of the speeding car. Kevin squinted and glared out the window, chugging along a long empty road that somehow encircled the entire sprawling town: downtown, suburbs, and all. The agonizingly slow sunset made everybody glow. Julie made a futile attempt at shielding her eyes from the light, and ultimately settled on starting out either window or at the culinary bowl.

Gwen, most stunned by the outburst, sighed. "Hey, listen, I know..."

Kevin swung his head in her direction for a second with limitless agitation. His eyes glinted as he spoke weakly in slightly simmered anger: "No, **you** listen, Gwen. This may not come as a concern to you, but," with his voice getting louder and higher, "I have a body in the trunk of my car. A sack of skin and bones! This is seriously fu... screwed up!"

Gwen interjected acidly: "He's my cousin." Gesturing to the uneasy girl in the backset, she added, "And her boyfriend. You act like you're his flipping brother when you couldn't care less about him most of the time!"

Kevin noticeably bristled while Julie, mostly calm to this point, reddened and stared down at the bowl she realized she found she was solidly hugging. The eyes blinked back at her twice.

He tongued his teeth in anger for a second. He did care somewhat about Ben, and, yeah, mostly as a way of being close to Gwen. But that wasn't significant right now. Kevin took a moment to let his nostrils flare. As a result, his voice came out with much less furor than the intended shout: "Don't turn this around on me! You know what kind of 'probable cause' crap this gives me? And not just here on Earth, but across the entire freaking galaxy?" He lightly smacked at the Plumbers' Badge resting on the dashboard to make the point. "Do you know how much the Magistrate would love to pin a murder-of-a-galactic-ambassador charge on me or whatever and get me tossed back into the Null Void for life? You've been there, Gwen! I'm not going back! Or why not just kill me? There's not much else in the punishment scale for the stuff I've done!"

Gwen darkened briefly at the melodrama; shaking his head, he continued on furiously. "This isn't normal, Gwen. This isn't just one screwed up transformation like accidentally going Big Chill over Spidermonkey over Swampfire or having hands teleported in weird places like everyday strange Ben Tennyson stuff. This is, like, _my_ realm of mutation! The accident kind! The corruption kind! And it doesn't go well against what went over last night!"

Julie took the chance to speak as he glowered at the lines on the road to prepare the next sentence of his rant. "Wait, what exactly happened last night? And, Kevin, what mutation are you..."

Kevin snorted like an angered bull. She was cut off by an abrupt, yet fluid, flinging of Kevin's pilfered ID Mask in her direction. It thumped against the door and settled next to her with a glow of refracted sunlight. Even with her vision obscured by the upholstered seat, she could see Kevin's sectionalized, humanoid, but no-less-mutated form. His body heat left the car in an instant. Recoiling slightly, she stared down at the bowl with a quiet, "Oh."

Gwen was struck by the reference to the mutation which she and he detested equally. She stared up at the enraged driver in part fear, part understanding as the situation more or less dawned on her. She spun around and looked at the now-silent Julie and her bowl with worry. _Okay, maybe this is a little bit screwed up._

Voice cracking, Kevin ended his rant. "So, don't freaking say I'm not worried about this."

Letting that settle for a moment, Julie muttered to Gwen with a hushed tone. "So, what really happened last night?"

"Well, um..."

Much calmer now, Kevin bitterly spat his understanding of things. "We got ambushed. We were going for some Galvan prototype that can fix DNA corruptions on the fly. For the obvious reasons... and the not-so-obvious ones. Plumber kids and stuff. Really useful, to me if nobody else."

Questioningly, Julie mouthed the name of the diminutive species to Gwen. She responded with two hand gestures, representing a creature 5" or so in height and another motioning bug-eyes; her point was understood.

"The thing was intercepted before getting into the Bellwood trade market."

Julie spoke up. "Bellwood has a trade market for that alien kinda stuff?!"

Gwen thought briefly of the Hive, and responded with a triumphant affirmative. "More than you'll ever need to know."

"It was coming to Earth specifically for me, so I arranged to get it back from the supposedly human gang that nicked it... for a nominal fee. Or trade."

Gwen scoffed: "Which he had no intention of paying."

He growled in response. "... Because it was mine..."

Julie muttered, "Come on, you two! And? What next?"

The 16-year-old mutant tried to bite his lip, only ending with one crystallized bit poking out over the other. "Long confrontation short, the single human that was supposed to meet me was instead a team of guys who I kinda think were disguised aliens." _The guns were a bit of a giveaway. I mean, they'd have to be some pretty strange humans to..._

_"_They attacked, and Ben somehow hid..." He paused. Gwen didn't know this part; for all she knew, he fell down the rock face while fighting. _Forget it,_ he thought with an internal sigh,_ might as well have everybody good and pissed all at once_.

Gwen was all too uncanny with this type of thing. "Hid where?" Her voice tightened indescribably.

"He... he hid himself under my car..."

Gwen broke in tersely: "And you drove off."

Kevin paused. "Yeah. I rounded a corner trying to lose some of those guys, and..."

Gwen gasped with her suspicions confirmed, twisting back around in her seat to face Kevin. She reacted just as Kevin expected: total explosion.

"It was YOU?!"

Exasperatedly, he spat, "No, obviously! It's not like I did it on purpose!"

She screamed nearly at the top of her lungs. "You're the one who threw Ben off of a freaking cliff?!"

Julie hissed, "What?!" She didn't notice the sudden surge of the contents of the bowl backwards, towards her.

"It was not a cliff! More like... a... um...." Kevin wasn't good at defending himself. "Besides, I had no idea he was there!" His voice rose another octave, cracking weakly on the last word.

"HOW COULD YOU NOT?!"

"What do you mean?"

"Where do you think he went?! He was standing next to you!"

"I thought he was fighting with you! There's no way I could've known at all!"

Obviously intending to win this argument, Gwen went for the ballistic option. Her voice became extremely dark all at once: "You _killed _him."

Previously entirely on Gwen's side, Julie spluttered to a halt and grabbed onto the corner of the driver's seat. "Wait, no, what?! Ben _died_?"

"Guys, no, no I di..." The speed of the car dipped as he removed his feet from the pedals in order to avoid accidentally stamping down either. I_ wouldn't take too much damage if I jump out of the car, would I? _He sighed. _But the girls probably would if it went out of control..._

"He fell and he died because of you! No wonder you were worried about stuff this just now. You were just biding your time, Kevin! Did you know this was going to happen? Ben collapsing into a puddle of goop on the side of a pizza joint? Did you expect this, Kevin? You... you... freaking sociopath!"

"Gwen, I..."

His would-be pathetic defense was punctuated by a sudden loud yell. In a prime example of the Doppler effect, a male scream echoed from a distance until it reverberated around the front and slammed with a thump against the hood of the car.

* * *

He crept along the brick wall noiselessly. Between his silent feet and the shadows, the only thing that made his presence known was the lingering smell left behind him, which reeked of deodorant body spray, sweat, and garbage.

The sounds of the city around him were deafening - sirens, cars, a handful of drunk guys on the corner, a noisy rap song about 30 yards way - despite the sun having only just gone down. Heavy light pollution made night come early to the locality. It shimmered under the yellowish street lights.

Then again, he had both oversensitive eyes and ears.

He didn't like being seen... not that anybody would care about him. The rat boy. The freak.

The teenager snorted, which came out as a strangled breath through his rodent nose, to try and divert himself from those thoughts. Failing that, he continued making his way along the wall. He really didn't know why he was being so stealthy. He was naturally that way; something to do with his agility or the matted fur all over his body. He didn't care all that much; all he knew was that he smelled like a dumpster and he could sneak in places and not get shot. Whatever; acting like a smelly James Bond made him feel better, at least subconsciously.

God only knew why some gang/cult thing would base their center of operations in an abandoned factory in the slums. Maybe it was the mystique. Maybe it was that word: gang. _That really decides it_, he thought, _that's why they're here_. He'd dealt with worse. Gangs, of course. From what he'd heard from these guys, they were pretty cordial and normal. Less gang and more church club. Out of an abandoned factory in the city. That made his fur itch. How contradictory they were... it was unnerving; hence the sneaking. They had asked him to come, of course, and he accepted enthusiastically because he knew it would mean money.

Inching along the side of the building, he was trying to find a way into the compound without attracting the attention of the building's occupants or the surrounding buzzed locals. This was hard because, being who he was, people always had the need to annoy the crap out of him. Right as he under passed a conspicuously unclean yet unbroken window, his phone began to ring noisily with some uncharacteristic jazzy tune. He never bothered to change it; he'd be tossing it and getting a new one within a week or so.

Silently cussing, he dashed across the street, around a pole, and onto the ground. His rear quills - if you could call them that, _I'm not a freaking porcupine_ - stuck annoyingly against the pole as he sprawled out his bony legs. Taking a gulp of air, he hit a button on the phone. He answered with such wrath and frustration distilled into a loud whisper that he nearly felt a squeak rise in his throat.

"_What do you WANT?!"_

The voice came out low, rumbly, and subdued. He could only guess what the likely nearby caller was on. "Yo, Argit, whassup?"

"Kinda busy, what-do-you-want?"

"Busy? Ha, dude, what, are you digging through a trash can? Find any good cheese?" He could feel the transmitted air change as the caller moved away slightly for a heavy, spaced-out laugh.

"Yeah yeah, really funny. I'll ask for the _third _time... um, er, uh..."

"Dawg, it's Dwayne." The voice laughed again.

His eyes opened up in silent frustration, baffled as to why the guy still wouldn't say anything useful.

"Okay, great, _Dwayne_, what is it?"

"Aw, man, I was just a'callin' to see... uh... what..."

"See what?"

"Well, you know, eh..." He trailed off with a laugh.

Argit dug two fingers into the fur along his forehead, dramatically flicking them out while talking: "Listen, man, if you're so baked outta your SKULL that you can't form a damn sentence, then why are you on the phone with me?!"

The response came slightly faster and with an annoyed tone. "Jeez, dude, sorry. Chill out, some. I was calling to see if you have any produc..."

He screamed gutturally into the phone for a split second before hanging it up and slamming it on the ground. Exasperated and stressed, he sighed and run his fingers over the top of his head. With a poke and sigh, he realized that he had shot a sizable handful of quills from the back of his head.

_Man, I hate junkies._

He much preferred the opposite side of his trading gig: alien tech, not drugs. No mortal danger. No getting shot. No people making jokes about you eating garbage. No police, even; just the Plumbers, and they were in favor of some free market "as long as it's not illegal" crap and even that was shady enough to circumvent.

Moreover, he liked the aliens. Alien arms dealers, psuedo-humans, Plumbers, Plumber's kids, heck, even regional super-villains... they all understood him. Or, at least, resembled him. Maybe it just appealed to his hybrid side.

He'd paid off a retired Plumber medic to run a couple of genetics test on him. No dice; he was 51% human and 49% god-knows-what. The sarcastic doctor told him to go home, make sure his mother was human, and move on with life. He had laughed at the insensitive joke and promptly shoved the man's stun-gun up his nose and pulled the trigger.

Surely it varied how "alien" the people he associated with were; he thought fleetingly of the beautiful Gwen Tennyson. And, then, in a none-too-coincidental jump, Kevin Levin. His conscience moaned in the back of his head like an injured puppy; he brushed it away in the same way. Kevin had screwed him over so many times that he deserved a little revenge. Plus, whatever these guys wanted to do with Kevin was none of his business; all he knew was that it got him a crapload of cash for only selling out his location. Not bad for two days' silent stalking.

His conscience squealed again.

It was by no coincidence he did what he did; that is, "dealing" of all shapes and sizes. He thought with a breathless snicker that that was his best shot at ever becoming someone worth anything. _Hell_, he thought,_ I could be with my mom_. A shudder - despite the mugginess of the night - punctuated the thought. His mother - ugh. Between the addictions, personality, and downright lack of sanity, she was the only person on Earth he had no problem believing screwed a rat man from outer space. At least, that was the way he saw it. Maybe his absentee father was some honored dignitary or great warrior who had a taste for poor inner-city earthling women. He doubted all that, though. It seemed less sane than was possible without lacking all critical thought entirely.

He closed his eyes and let his mind wander. Maybe things wouldn't have been so bad if his powers - if you could call them that, more sick mutations - hadn't manifested themselves at a time when his home life particularly unstable. He couldn't balance surviving town, surviving his mother, and surviving school with thick, matted hair growing all over his body and an insatiable hunger for anything rotted and smelly. There were his fellow students and so-called friends. And, on top of all that, his snout... no, not even going there.

As the day's exhaustion was starting to get to him - there, sprawled out on the concrete - he wanted to forget it all. He hoped that punk Kevin and his buddies got the tar beaten out of them and got shot up all nice and clean with whatever injection that was; something hy-hydrosynth- whatever. It looked pretty cool. He didn't care. In fact, he didn't even want to be doing this "infiltration," even though he'd fetch three times as much for that Galvan crap if he sold it on the real black market and not to some creepy gang in the city. He didn't want to get paid, even.

_Eh, maybe my sleepiness really is getting to me._

His eyes flickered, lingering spastically on random objects as they lidded themselves: a campfire-in-a-barrel up the street; a beaten-up car two blocks away; the tiny shrub before him.

_Wait, is that bush blue?_

He went out like a light; he normally wouldn't have, considering instinct and all that. Maybe he hadn't had the requisite three coffees that day, or maybe a chemical agent had been released into the air from the manhole nearby that spelled dangerous drowsiness for his non-human side.

Yeah, maybe that one.

Twitching silently in his sleep, a long shadow stretched out by an overhead streetlight draped over his thick fur and worn jacket. The person - stocky, tall, with bleached-white skin and brown cropped hair - smiled at the snoozing rat boy. He grinned and snorted, moving his head just enough that his sunglasses glimmered from a far off reflection.

His voice - smooth, but growl-like, as if etched into marble: "Well, well, well; it seems our visitor is here."

* * *

With astonishing ease - considering their speed - Kevin slammed on the brakes. Gwen swung about a foot forward before being yanked back by a locking seatbelt, as did Julie. Curiously, the contents of her bowl did not move at all. The tires locked, and the back of the car swung forward with a piercing screech until it was nearly facing the other direction.

Not sparing a moment, Kevin jumped out of the car to examine what he assumed would be ragged pulp of a pedestrian. No such luck. Sighing with relief, he started investigating for the source of the thump. It took him a few seconds to find a baseball-sized dent in the hood, to which he screamed in culminated frustration and kicked a tire.

This is why he thought he had gone crazy when he heard a voice say, "Aw, jeez, man, I'm sorry!" Quickly glancing at Gwen and Julie, who had gotten out of the car shortly after he had, Kevin confirmed their likewise hearing.

"Listen, thank God you guys slowed down I could barely keep up, I mean, I totally should've been about two feet higher but it was all I could do to just keep, you know, hovering and all and I didn't want to do anything like ram the back of the window and make Kevin, like, veer off or something into a ditch because you could get hurt and!"

The three shouted in varying levels of confusion and unison: "Ben!"

They searched for the source, not at all helped by the singular utterance of, "Uhh, hey guys, up here!"

After a couple of seconds of searching, Gwen identified a tiny fist-sized spaceship making a low-pitched whirr. It hovered just above the roof of the car. Ben - at least, in, erm, spaceship form - began to move upward by a couple of inches.

A quick look inside revealed that the insides of the bowl were surging upward in the direction of Ben. Kevin was the first to make the connection, futilely shouting at the marionette-type controller to stop moving as the plastic wrap stretched apart. The car splattered with what was undoubtedly Goop, the Omnitrix alien. Or, at least, whatever Ben was _right now_ in alien form.

There was a second scream of frustration involving an extremely long string of cuss words and at least three breathless mentions of his car. And, likewise, there was a second stream of robotic, tinny, semi-sincere apologies from Ben.

As parts of him started squelching noisily through the half-cracked windows, Ben made an ominous statement. "Oh, I should probably mention that there's a cop car some half-a-mile behind you. He started following, oh, I dunno, when you hit a hundred miles an hour."

Winning the impeccable timing award of the day, Gwen and Julie looked in the direction they came from - towards the front of the car - just in time so see and hear the far-off startings of a police siren.

"Aw, come on!"

The three jumped into a sort of panic, scrambling around trying to figure out what to do. They couldn't drive off; that'd be suspicious. They couldn't even move the car to a parking position logical to the roadway. Suggestions abounded, such as:

"Kevin, bust up your car!" This was Gwen, obviously intending to look as if they had broken down.

"Wh_at_?!" His voice resembled a crow's screech. The intensity of it was so high that one could swear his hair leaped up a bit.

"You know, absorb some of the road! Make it look like your engine blew or something!"

"Um, how'bout HELL NO!?"

Similar suggestions continued, devolving into arguments as the police car almost eerily refused to break the speed limit in its approach.

Then, of course, there was the matter of Ben.

With the police close enough to see their glinting lights, Julie made a helpful contribution after settling Gwen and Kevin's arguing. She pulled open the passenger door, pulled down the backseat entrance to the trunk, and motioned for Ben to... erm, float in.

She also grabbed Kevin's ID Mask from her seat and tossed it at the grimacing mutant. He wiped what of the green goo he could from it and fitted it back on, instantly transforming back to a human form. Now acting slightly less as if they were suggesting the death of his firstborn, he muttered dismissively. "He better be going in there to soak up the rest of his gunk."

Julie pursed her lips; Gwen flicked the back of Kevin's head contemptuously. "Where else do you suggest he go?"

Flippantly, the muscular teenager responded: "The sky."

"Okay, Kevin, that won't look suspicious at all. A floating green blob disappearing into the air. Let's go with that!" She rolled her eyes and stalked angrily to the other side of the car. She fully intended to keep up with her suggestion to act as if the car broke down. Something along the lines of being "most statistically likely to get you out of your thirty-ninth speeding ticket." Either way, the engine was smoking slightly from their incredible speeds. They had maybe an ounce, two ounces maximum, of plausibility. Julie joined a similarly innocuous position kicking the front tire which she hoped the police officer noticed was entirely filled with air.

The officer was closing in, enough to begin slowing down from the snail's pace they were already at.

A very noticeable, very suspicious rattling noise began to come from the back of Kevin's car, sounding vaguely as if a professional boxer was punching a children's inflatable bounce-house. Kevin would have no business with this. Taking advantage of the trunk being opposite the officer's view, he quietly approached his car and popped open the back, halfway into asking, "What the hell are you doing," before the girls had paid him any mind.

He paused thoughtfully. There was no green goop anywhere... just the... _Hmm. _He reached to pick up what he thought would be the saggy wrapper that had been Ben Tennyson, instead poking at his ribcage. His _solid_ ribcage. Intrigued, he picked up the unconscious 15-year-old by the opposite shoulder.

_How the... ? This sucker's breathing!_

Lifting up the Tennyson boy further, he tried to whistle lightly to get Gwen's attention. She was still glaring moodily at the sunset. He tried a stage whisper. "Gweeeeen..."

A loud, drawling, husky women's voice responded. "Put him down now and step away from the vehicle!"

The girls snapped in his direction, catching the glimpse of the suddenly full-bodied Ben in surprise before Kevin unceremoniously dropped the body. Ben slumped backed into the trunk while Kevin raised his hands and stepped away with a sheepish frown. He took a mental note; _strike one._

The woman officer was loud and bossy, in about her mid-thirties. Thin-lipped and angry, she had a tendency to scream and she looked upon Kevin with what can only be described as disgust.

"What on EARTH are you children doing out on the back roads of Bellwood in excess of 90 miles an hour!" She didn't ask questions. She made interrogative yells.

For example: Kevin leaned slightly on his heels to get a look at her name badge. "What are you trying to pull, son?!"

"Just looking at your name. Was trying to be respectful of my elders, ma'am."

She frowned grotesquely. "Kissing ass gets you nowhere. You address me as ma'am and nothing else. I'm Officer Lilith. Now, I repeat, what're you kids doing?!"

Kevin gulped and used his most peaceful, diplomatic voice to respond. "Well, ma'am, our friend here was sick..."

Julie helped. "Yeah, really sick, throwing up all over the place." Gwen remained silent.

"We were trying to get him home to his parents; they'd know what to do, ma'am. But I kind of... erm..." Kevin finally put his arms slowly down to his sides.

He glanced agreeably at Gwen before adding, "... spun out a little trying to avoid... uh, a deer. Gave us all a bit of a scare."

Clearly skeptical, the woman spat a response. "Uh-huh. And where'd this'un live, then?" She motioned toward the trunk and Ben.

Julie answered. "Right past the start of the interstate, ma'am. His parents were gonna... uh, meet us there."

"Past?"

The tennis player cringed. "Sorry. Before. I'm a little worried and nervous and all." She said the latter sentence in a single, short breath.

Gwen looked at Officer Lilith without gaining her attention. She'd taken a psychology class before; she knew this woman's thought process through her eyes. She was not buying it. Gwen twisted around to make a couple of eye motions at Kevin. He gulped. _Strike two._

Before Kevin could make any motion to dissuade her otherwise, the woman had yanked open the driver's side rear door and was poking through the sleek green car with a long metallic flashlight.

After a minute or so of the three teenagers trying their best to silently converse using their eyes and word-shaping mouths, the woman extracted herself from the car. She addressed Kevin once again: "Son, why does the interior of your motor vee-hickle smell like burnt plastic?" She whipped around her flashlight to Gwen and Julie, pointing at each nonchalantly. "Were any of you tryin'a... smoke? Anything?" Both girls profusely and incredulously shook their heads.

"Whadda' 'bout you?" She turned the flashlight on and pointed it into Kevin's eyes. _Now that's just plain mean_. He squinted, pleading, "No, ma'am. Of course not."

She grunted in a generally negative way, pushing past the blinded Kevin to look through the trunk. Well, mostly at Ben, poking and prodding at his movement-less form. She pulled his shirt up, checked his pulse, and spun back around whenever she felt satisfied. "Why was this young'un in the trunk of your car?"

Kevin, now just as flippant as he was before the arrival of the plus-sized member of the law, didn't miss a beat. "We said he was sick."

The woman sneered and prepared to start screaming, Gwen finally decided to jump in. "He'd be having to sit in the back with her," motioning to Julie. "He would've been all over the place." _Not too far from the truth, _she idly thought.

"Uh-huh." There she went again. "Uh-huh." She looked derisively at all three children, with special distaste reserved for Kevin. "Well then..." She muttered as she walked back to the police car.

_Strike three?_

Panicing, Kevin mouthed at the two girls, "What is she doing?!" Two shrugs were given in response. Gwen looked relieved, although Julie remained unchangingly worried.

Kevin looked back in her direction to find a gun pointed at him. "Whoahwhoahwhoah, lady!" His hands shot upward again.

"Please remain calm. Do not attempt to escape. I will be taking you and your friend from the trunk back to town for holding and questioning."

Gwen, surprisingly, was the first to respond. "Why?!"

The three noticed that the officer was carrying two pairs of handcuffs. Kevin's jaw dropped. She focused her following ire at Kevin as if he had spoken.

"The way I see this situation is one of two ways. Either you two boys were both under the influence of illegal substances, which I highly suspect, or you beat the kid unconscious and kidnapped him."

His face contorted in disbelief. "Why... how could you say I beat him up? Or was on drugs?! Neither are true!"

The woman squeezed her lips together as if she was unimpressed by his pleading. "Son, there are bruises all up and down his back and ribs. Plus, there's this funky fist-shaped thing at the small of his back. That ain't no sickness I know. Looks like the poor soul got a concussion, knocked clean out 'cross the state."

As she applied the handcuffs to Kevin, he flashed his look of disbelief at the girls. Both were equally as surprised; Gwen looked as if an eye or two were about to pop out of her skull.

She moved on to apply the same treatment - uselessly, to an extent - to Ben. As she did so, Kevin bit down on his tongue and took a breath.

"Listen, ma'am? Officer? I promise you," entering a pleading tone, "_deeply_ promise you..."

She took just a millisecond's interest in him. "... you are wrong. This is a real emergency."

Her retort was instant.

"Like hell it is," she growled with flecks of spit into his face.

Strongly avoiding the desire to soak up the asphalt and bash her forehead with his, he responded earnestly. "It is. I swear. Look, do you know Officer Daniels? Officer Jacobson? Talk to them. They'll explain this."

She sneered up at him. He squinted almost-intimidatingly, hinting that he wouldn't like another spit shower very much at all.

"Boy. I do not give a rat's tail for your bribes and favors in the county police department. I only report to the Sheriff, the law, and God." She took him as roughly as she could by the arm. "And... you... are... coming with me no matter what you think, you worthless punk scum."

He glared at the officer for a moment and turned away biting his lip. She continued to pull him along. He looked worriedly at the two girls, both decidedly freaked.

The woman pushed Kevin angrily into the back seat. Moments later, she returned and heaved Ben onto her shoulders and slung him into the police car as well. Afterwards, she made a motion to get into the driver's seat.

Julie, bewildered, called, "Um... excuse me?! What about us?"

The woman looked up blankly. "I see no evidence that you two were committing any wrongdoing." They could just barely see Kevin mouthing something foul at her.

She motioned to Gwen. "You. Redhead. You have your license?"

The Tennyson girl didn't miss a beat, nodding helplessly.

"Mhm. Stay out of trouble."

She started to sit down and turned the car on, but paused.

"Oh, and redhead?" Gwen looked back at her, barely hiding her anger and confusion. "Stay away from the bad boys. You may think it's cute, but it's not. It'll just end badly."

She slammed the door and pulled down the window. "Same goes for you, track-suit." With that, she pulled off in the opposite direction away from them. The sun had set entirely; the sky only now remained a glowing pink.

Julie looked at herself and muttered angrily, "This is a tennis jacket..."

Gwen growled in frustration and threw a pink ball of useless energy in the direction of the car. "That must be the most insane, sexist, and stupid police officer in the state!"

As she walked over to the passenger-side door and got in, Julie snarked, "If not the most unintentionally ironic."

* * *

He collapsed into the dark red armchair with a sigh. Completing the mood, he rubbed at his temples and looked with seriousness at the two in front of him. Having had their "party" of five reduced to three - his wife having to go spend some time in the bathroom calming down, and the mysterious investigator running outside for nobody knew what - gave him the opportunity to speak clearly with the more innocuous set of guests.

"Please tell me who you are. I have a reasonable expectation for truth."

Carl Tennyson was nothing if not to-the-point. That, and he had a nigh-undetectable ability to distinguish truth from lies that he had inherited from his mother. She swore up and down that neither of her sons had the "spark," and they just want right along with it having never known anything different.

Slightly intimidated by the Tennyson father, the young doctor and nurse spoke measuredly. The man, yellowish and morose, responded first. "Andy. Andrew. Uh-uh... Andrew Miller." His girlfriend added, "And I'm Tabitha Phillips."

Carl nodded. "Okay. What do you do?"

Tabitha answered rapid-fire. "Nurse." Andy took his time: "I'm, uh, erm, a resident in the morgue of, er, Mercy Tri-County Hospital." He paused. "Oh, hah, an, um, medical resident. Not like I live there or anything."

He snorted. "Barring anything that's already been said, why are you here?"

The doctor shrugged. "Not sure. Um... a hunch, really."

His girlfriend pulled her hand away from her chin and laid it across her lap. "Bodies don't tend to disappear... at all... ever..."

Mr. Tennyson hunched over slightly. Clasping his hands together over his mouth, he muttered, "Indeed." His eyes glinted. Unsure how to phrase it, he stumbled through his next sentence. "Are you sure... that that was my son?"

Tabitha remained tight-lipped at this question. Andy took about thirty seconds to reluctantly nod. Fear settled, gnawing at the back of his throat.

Carl took it in slowly and in stride.

"Do want to see this confusion of yours answer... resolved? Are you prepared to see this through?"

All three were made somewhat uneasy by that. After a series of looks at one another, the pair nodded. Andy quietly verbalized: "I don't see why not."

"Are you quite sure? I wouldn't think negatively of either of you. What you could be getting involved in.... well, it's huge. Bigger than you could imagine. I know from personal experience."

Doubt crept into the doctor's expression for a moment before reaffirming with a nod.

Carl blinked casually, although he was internally surprised. He wouldn't have done the same, in their position. "Okay."

He sighed. "First of all." The man slowly raised an arm to point at the front door, which he had swiftly locked upon the agent's exit. "That man is not even close to being an officer or inspector or whatever. Of any kind."

Tabitha smiled; she had known all along. A normal officer wouldn't be so damned heartless.

Andy asked. "So he is...?"

"Government," Mr. Tennyson generalized. "I can't be sure, but I know his mannerisms from my dad. He did the same type of thing when I was a kid."

Confusion reentered the doctor's face. "And what was that?"

Carl Tennyson exhaled, unsure how to approach the subject. The young woman seemed to already be miles ahead; she was trying to get her husband to look at the very obviously not-normal gun hanging just above their heads.

Despite the situation, the father smirked. "Second: are either of you familiar with any alien activity in the area? Bellwood in particular, but the surrounding area."

"Ali...?"

"Extraterrestrial."

Andy was baffled. He looked at his girlfriend and prepared to stammer something unintelligible; his confusion was punctuated by a sniff. All three looked up to see Sandra - Mrs. Tennyson - behind her husband. His expression returned to steel.

His wife - eyes puffy and red, voice wavering audibly even though she was whispering - lowered herself to his sitting height to say something in his ear. As she finished, his eyes widened and his mouth opened wordlessly.

A knock started to come at the front door.

Carl Tennyson's lips formed a straight line. He stood up and straightened his glasses decisively. Firmer than before, he glanced at the visiting couple. "I can repeat my question, if you like. We must leave right now for the police station. Please follow if you are interested, as you say." He turned towards the door as another knock came.

Both visitors gaped for just a moment. Momentarily at ease, Sandra wiped something from her eye while looking at the two. She didn't know what to say, biting on her lips awkwardly to come up with something.

"Down the rabbit hole, huh?"

* * *

"Yo, Max!"

Two small voices told the called-for man that the speaker was being quietly told off for the blunt shout. Max smiled to himself with a small chuckle and reached back up to twist a fuel line back into place. He wasn't particularly fond of the disrespect; then again, these kids weren't his. He chose them.

The voice spoke again, slightly quieter but also slightly closer. Max glanced at his peripheral vision to see two large unclothed red feet about a yard away from the underside of the RV, where he was. "Uhm, Mr. Tennyson?"

His chuckle was a bit deeper this time, flowing into what he said. "Yes, Manny. What is it?"

The hybrid Tetramand kneeled down into the thin dirt, his back two arms supporting him. He tried to lay all the way down in order to face the Tennyson elder, but the awkward placement of his hands forbade that. "Do you have a hexagonal washer anywhere?"

Max's brow knitted. He wiped his hands free of gasoline on a rag next to him and shifted toward the teenager. "Why would a washer need to be hexagonal? Wouldn't that defeat the purpose?"

A contemplative pause came before he said, "That's what it said in your blueprints."

Almost simultaneously, Max responded: "Well, I need to take a look at that. What blueprint is it for?"

After wiping a smudge from his face, Max grabbed the edge of the Rustbucket and heaved his way out from under the vehicle. Manny offered his upper right hand to help pull the grandfather up off the ground. The Plumber steadied himself quickly and pulled the oil-covered towel from his shoulder. A small grease slick had rubbed off on one of his many customary Hawaiian button-up shirts.

Manny paused for a second, making sure he had the numbers right in his head. "I think... the... D-72 Plasma Blaster designs?"

Max smiled; his teachings were solid. "Good choice." Lazily switching shoulder placement of the dirty mechanic's rag, Max sauntered over to a picnic table. Cooper, looking enthralled, had the unfinished blaster floating in air and rotating in a couple of directions.

The blueprints already faced his direction. Cooper playfully let the weapon drop on the table to point out the issue to Max. His eyes flickered over the data, noting with satisfaction the progress they had made in only 30 minutes of concerted effort. After thinking about it for a second and pausing, Max laughed heartily.

Cooper, high, squeaky, and annoying, was perplexed: "What is it?"

Max slung the rag over another shoulder once again, grinning as he responded, "You kids are doing all too good of a job. My partner wrote those in himself almost 20 years ago. He said he'd know if people were fully reading his instructions. Otherwise, he could tell them to 'go build their own alien weapon'." He laughed for another 10 seconds or so, and then spoke again.

"Manny, all you need to do is tighten it down a bit harder and it'll work just fine. I think. Cooper, come with me for a few minutes." Max threw the towel onto the picnic table.

The tetramand settled with a smile back to the picnic table, while the intrigued blond-haired 14-year-old got up to follow Max. As they exited their small clearing, the elder Tennyson called back to the campsite's other three occupants: "Alan, you keep stirring that stew so it won't burn." The kid, who had taken charge of cooking it himself, let his hand return to its human form long enough to give a thumbs-up. "Helen, make sure Manny won't fire that thing without a very good reason." She looked up from a book at Manny with a smirk. "Pierce, make sure that reason doesn't involve a squirrel." He heard the whiskered hybrid laugh.

They walked for a bit in silence, with Cooper panting slightly less than he normally would have to keep up. Sure, it was getting dark - dangerous in itself for the 6-person team in terms of attacks and such - but Max was pretty stubborn once he got a spontaneous idea in his head. He had done something like this - what Helen had sarcastically called a "spirit walk" - for each of the other kids over the past couple of days. It was only fair to take Cooper out as well. Plus, the stew would take another half-hour to mature out of the larval stage. But Max didn't mention that.

The strange, almost-conflicting climate of the region manifested itself in whatever forest they were in: the trees soaked up the last bits of the days' sun. The surrounding area was swathed with an eerie twilight of a pallid grayish color that just barely lit their way. The trail was just barely that, with the path only just avoiding turn after turn into denser foliage. One couldn't be sure if they were actually following the trail or not. Luckily, Max knew where they were going, having finger-traced the route over a couple of aerial maps mere hours ago.

They made light talk, with Max making his way into his impression of an inspirational speech.

"So... uh, Cooper! You've been doing well for yourself!"

Although he did this much less often, the addressed boy responded in grunts. "Hm?"

"Oh, well, you know..." Max grumbled.

The teenager held back for a split second to stare at the hiking Tennyson man. _Does he really have nothing to say?!_

Luckily, Max began rattling some things off. "You're much stronger, you've made some friends, you are getting smarter with your powers every day."

Cooper beamed. "You're an asset to this team."

"Not to mention you getting out of the house, playing a little less video games, losing weight, et cetera." His smile collapsed. Max was never really good with these types of things.

"Anyways, I'm very proud of you. And I know your parents would be too."

The boy bit his tongue, correcting the elder man: "They _are_."

Max stumbled slightly. "Oh. Of course. I'm sorry." He didn't want to kill the kid emotionally by sharing the news that Cooper's mother had disappeared. It had only been for a day, then; he kept it under wraps.

The path started to twist steeply downhill into a small dip in the forest, an area relatively devoid of trees. Both men slid downhill in the dry dirt a couple of times as they descended.

"Right, then. Anyways, you're doing very well and you're going to do very well for yourself. That is, of course, if you start training."

He stared down at the ground both to steady his path and to hide his incredulous look. He was unsure what other training could be done with a technopath... take stuff apart faster? It just didn't seem to work.

"And, by training, I mean this."

Cooper looked up to realize he was about a foot away from slamming into a gigantic metallic pole. He looked the thing up and down, deducing that it was a very high voltage power line. The area hummed with electricity; the 14-year-old loved it.

Max stepped back a bit to observe and continue talking. "Found this spot on some aerial maps. They're actually pretty common throughout the state: gigantic, hidden power transformers."

The kid grinned in pure awe. He didn't want to ruin the moment by asking what that could possibly be for. The sun had totally set and it would be a moment before the moon rose; they concentrated on talking to one another.

"Cooper, how would you characterize your powers? Give me three."

The boy blinked for a few moments, generalizing everything he thought: "Uhm... okay, uh, manipulation. Understanding how things work., I guess. And... uh... deflection. Sometimes. Of energy, I mean."

Max nodded in the darkness. "Good. Now, from a fighting perspective, those are all... what?"

Unsure, Cooper slowly said, "De-fensive? I think?"

"Exactly. All defensive moves, both by your nature and the nature of your powers, correct?"

He didn't like to think of himself in that way; he wasn't really a fighting person when it didn't involve MMORPG's. "I think so."

"Okay. Do you know what species you are a hybrid of?"

Cooper sneered in the darkness, oddly grossed out. "Yeah, the Xen-a...the Xenogr... yeah. Something that ends with an 'r'."

Max laughed it off. "It is a doosie to pronounce. Thing is, I know quite a lot about them. Studied them when I was a Plumber initiate. Even know a few."

Without a doubt, Cooper knew Max was referencing his father. He wanted desperately to ask a question or two, but he let it slide. The moon was starting to rise; Cooper could just barely spot the ridges in Max's face.

"The thing is, though, they're not just defensive. They have a whole 'nother set of moves. Offensive ones." He used his fingers count off a few: "Absorption, redirection, generation."

The boy had never really thought about this kind of thing before. He assumed he could only ever play with electronics and stuff... but never energy. He had already placed his hands on the power line when Max stopped him. "Now, I want you to take it easy. Neither of us are totally sure of what will happen. I was told be a friend that you should... well, how would you, well, describe your powers normally?"

He lifted his hands slightly from the gigantic metal tube to think about it. "Well, I'm not... I think it's just like pushing... outward with my mind and linking things in to how... my head works. Or something. It's never really come up."

Max bit a fingernai. "M'kay. Seems like that works with what my friend told me. With this, you need to add the power source in the same way and just let it... flow, I assume."

His eyes widened at the awesome idea.

"Just be careful." With that, he stepped back a couple of feet.

_Okay, here goes nothing._

He firmly placed his hands against the cooling metal and willed himself outward. He could feel the hum and the buzz of the electricity clearly in his mind. Cooper took a second to synchronize his heartbeat and breathing.

And, with that, he let loose. Blue sparks exploded from around his hands. A strong, thick rope of electricity poured into his hands limitlessly. He felt it ecstatically: it charged every fiber of his body. Every minute hair stood on end across his body. He felt entirely charged, pulsating in mind and body with the alternating current.

He backed up somewhat, yet the connection stayed strong and grew longer. The entire area was lit in a flickering glow by the onslaught of sparks. He glanced at Max, who smiled proudly. He returned with an excited grin.

The technopath stepped back once more, breaking the connection in a grandiose manner. He was entirely on edge, jittering from excitement. He wanted to jump and shout. Summarily, it was the coolest thing he'd ever done.

He looked down at himself. His knee twitched slightly. If he looked closely, he swore he could see dancing rivulets of aquamarine just underneath his skin.

Max Tennyson was clearly impressed. "That was... incredible. Simply incredible."

His eyes widened, as if to respond affirmatively. The two shared a brief laugh. "How does it feel?"

There was no way to explain it. Sweat poured from his brow, but he didn't notice. "It's like drinking a thousand Cokes all at once while having an adrenaline rush." His fingers sparked as he said this. The elder wiped his face almost tiredly and smiled. He almost-academic tone returned. "Watch out. You've never done this before, and your body isn't going to want to hold onto it for long."

It hit him a that moment. An itching infected his entire body up and down. He squirmed just to remain on his feet; the feeling was just as overwhelming, except it had none of the positive effects. Max easily noticed the change in the boy's demeanor.

"Just let it out through your shoes, is what I was told."

The boy nodded obediently, desperately wanting to discharge. He spread his legs slightly and gave a slight mental push.

He had unconsciously raised his arm while doing this. Enjoying a much more exciting outlet, the electricity surged out of his right hand in a lightning bold the size of a small car. Max dived out of the way quickly, landing safely on his back a foot away. The energy passed just over his head and made a tree behind him explode as if it suddenly got scared. The accompanied sound was two-fold, with the sound of the hissing electric discharge overlaying a loud, bass-heavy boom. Leaves fell from their formerly safe positions as tiny flames. Birds took to the air from all around, flying for dear life.

Cooper gaped with slight embarrassed. He locked eyes with Max, who was observing the tree from his safe spot on the ground. He coughed.

"Well..."

They heard the noise again from the explosion; the second one. It was noticeably distant this time as an explosive _thwomp._

Max felt the need to state the obvious. "That isn't you."

The deep rumble came again, twice at rapid-fire. The treetops above them danced in an invisible wind.

"That isn't a squirrel, either."

They had both scrambled to the edge of the clearing when Max's phone rang. The two proceeded to dash up the side of the bowl-like incline as Max fumbled to reach for the ringing device. He attempted to answer his Plumber communicator twice before picking the right thing. He took a split second to identify the caller.

"Yes, Gwen?"

* * *

A/N: Um, so, wow. I promised to get this one quick, right? Shoot me. I deserve it. Was this a long time coming? Hell yeah. Have I been working on it the entire year? Sorry, no. Did I enjoy writing it? Yes. Do I hope to keep writing it? Also yes.

Some notes:  
- Okay, so I had a beta reader. That was in... January. Yes, this chapter was done in January. Oh, well. If anybody has the qualifications and wants to do it, hit me up via PM.  
- This is my longest FF chapter ever. I hope to keep up the record going.  
- You know, though, the only ways to show us how much you liked it are to review, favorite, PM, etc.  
- The less imaginative of you will think the guy calling Argit was looking for fresh produce.


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